SOURCE: Gilbert, Roger. “Post-Love Poetry.” Michigan Quarterly Review 41, no. 2 (spring 2002): 309-28.

In the following essay, Gilbert discusses recent works of poetry that explore failed romantic relationships and argues that Carson's The Beauty of the Husband may be “the first true masterpiece of the twenty-first century.”

The phrase “love poetry” usually evokes early passion, the rhetoric of courtship and seduction, a long tradition of fevered rhyme that runs from Sappho and Catullus, through Donne and Marvell, to a few twentieth-century throwbacks like Millay and Cummings. But there are other kinds of love poetry as well, including the poetry of long-married love practiced by the Brownings, William Carlos Williams, and most recently by Maxine Kumin (The Long Marriage) and Eavan Boland (Against Love Poetry). And then there is what might be called post-love poetry, a strain that explores the messy aftermath of love, its failure to sustain itself and the...