Love is arguably the most universal yet most elusive human experience. It defies simple categorization, morphing and changing depending on the perspective from which it is viewed. For centuries, poets, writers, and thinkers have attempted to capture its essence, wrestling with its complexities, its joys, and its pains. These diverse attempts to articulate love through language contribute significantly to what we might consider a “love poetry definition” – not a single, rigid explanation, but a rich tapestry of insights woven from countless literary voices. Exploring these perspectives helps us understand the multifaceted nature of love as expressed in the vast landscape of poetry and literature. Like exploring the vast landscape of poetry, understanding love requires looking at its many forms and feelings.
Here, we delve into how some notable literary figures have defined, described, or grappled with the phenomenon of love, offering varied lenses through which to view this powerful emotion.
An antique postcard illustration depicting a couple, symbolizing love.
Kurt Vonnegut, known for his unique blend of satire and humanism, offered a simple, perhaps idealistic, perspective on love’s purpose in The Sirens of Titan:
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
This suggests love is not just an emotion but a fundamental action or state of being, a core function of human existence.
Anaïs Nin, whose prolific diaries explored the depths of human relationships, defined love through the lens of acceptance in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller:
What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.
For Nin, the definition rests not on transformation or idealized perfection, but on embracing the reality of another person.
Stendhal, the 19th-century French writer, took a more volatile view in his treatise on love, describing it as an uncontrollable force:
Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. … there are no age limits for love.
This definition emphasizes love’s irrational, unpredictable nature, likening it to a physical ailment that strikes without regard for age or intent.
Vintage postcard art showing a woman looking pensively, reflecting on emotions like love.
Perhaps one of the most widely quoted definitions highlighting love’s inherent risk comes from C. S. Lewis in The Four Loves:
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Lewis presents love as a necessary vulnerability, framing safety from love as a form of spiritual death. This powerful passage resonates deeply with anyone who has experienced love’s potential for both profound connection and pain.
Humorist Lemony Snicket, in Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can’t Avoid, offered a wry, relatable definition focusing on love’s transformative, often messy, effects:
Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.
This less romantic view captures the often-undeniable disruption and awkwardness that love brings into our lives.
Susan Sontag, known for her piercing intellect, found love to be uniquely resistant to analysis, stating in her journals As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh:
Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.
For Sontag, even the most complex human interactions pale in comparison to the enigma of love.
A classic illustration of a cherub with a heart, representing the timeless theme of love in art and poetry.
The gritty poet Charles Bukowski, despite his often cynical view, offered a memorable, if fleeting, definition of love in an archival interview:
Love is kind of like when you see a fog in the morning, when you wake up before the sun comes out. It’s just a little while, and then it burns away… Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.
This paints love as an ethereal, temporary state that dissolves when confronted with the harsh light of everyday reality.
Shakespeare, the master of capturing human experience, defined love’s perception in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.
This famous line suggests love is more about perception, imagination, and perhaps even delusion, than physical appearance.
Old postcard graphic of a couple embracing, capturing a moment of affection.
With characteristic wit, Ambrose Bierce provided a satirical love poetry definition in The Devil’s Dictionary:
Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.
This humorous take defines love as a fleeting madness that finds its end in the institution of marriage.
Actress Katharine Hepburn, reflecting on her life in Me: Stories of My Life, defined love by the act of giving:
Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only with what you are expecting to give — which is everything.
This highlights the selfless, altruistic aspect of love, focusing on the act of offering everything to another.
Philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness, warned against hesitation when it comes to love:
Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
For Russell, true happiness requires embracing the risks of love, as caution inhibits its realization.
Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it even more starkly in The Brothers Karamazov, defining hell itself through the absence of love:
What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
This powerful statement positions love as a fundamental necessity for spiritual well-being, its absence leading to profound suffering.
Antique illustration of a woman holding a heart, symbolizing vulnerability or emotion.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in a letter to his young daughter explaining the importance of evidence, linked love to observable reality:
People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.
Dawkins offers a scientific perspective, seeing love not just as an internal feeling but as something evidenced by external actions and observations.
Paulo Coelho, in The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession, described love as an uncontrollable force:
Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.
This definition emphasizes love’s wild, indomitable nature, resistant to human attempts at constraint or intellectualization.
James Baldwin, reflecting on life and relationships in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction, saw love as a dynamic, challenging process:
Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
Baldwin moves away from the fairy-tale beginning and end, defining love as an ongoing struggle and a process of maturation.
Haruki Murakami, in Kafka on the Shore, linked falling in love to a search for wholeness:
Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven’t seen in a long time.
This perspective defines love as a quest for completion, evoking a sense of nostalgic longing tied to the beloved. Understanding love, like understanding different poetic structures, involves appreciating the varied forms and meanings it can take.
Early 20th-century postcard featuring Cupid aiming an arrow at a heart, a common motif in love literature and poetry.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, offered a definition of love based on shared vision in Airman’s Odyssey:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
This defines mature love not by mutual adoration alone, but by shared goals and a unified perspective on the world.
French novelist Honoré de Balzac, in Physiologie Du Mariage, linked judgment inversely to love:
The more one judges, the less one loves.
For Balzac, love requires a suspension of judgment, as critical evaluation erodes affection.
Novelist Louis de Bernières, in Corelli’s Mandolin, offered a definition that distinguishes between the initial infatuation and enduring love:
Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
This extensive passage defines love as the deep, rooted connection that remains after the initial passion fades, presenting it as a conscious choice and a blend of effort and luck.
An antique illustration of a woman holding a heart, symbolizing vulnerability or emotion.
E. M. Forster, in A Room with a View, described love’s indelible nature:
You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.
Forster aligns with poetic tradition, viewing love as an intrinsic, permanent part of the self that endures despite external forces.
English novelist Iris Murdoch, in Existentialists and Mystics, saw love as a difficult act of recognizing the reality of others:
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
This philosophical definition frames love as a profound act of stepping outside one’s own ego to truly acknowledge the independent existence and reality of another person.
A historical illustration on a postcard showing a couple seated together, representing companionship in love.
Perhaps one of the most relatable, if humble, definitions comes from Agatha Christie in her autobiography, echoing Anaïs Nin’s sentiment of acceptance:
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
Christie defines love through the quiet, deep acceptance of a person’s imperfections, finding affection even in their most awkward moments.
These diverse perspectives, drawn from the vast landscape of literature and including voices familiar to lovers of poetry, demonstrate that there is no single, definitive “love poetry definition.” Instead, love is a concept continuously explored, redefined, and experienced through the power of language. Each writer, poet, and thinker adds another brushstroke to the complex portrait of this fundamental human emotion, reminding us why love remains an enduring and central theme in art and life. These literary definitions offer profound insights, inviting us to reflect on our own understanding of love and its expression.