Marital love is rarely represented by poets, at least in their lyric poetry. Lyric, with its brevity, its intensity, its ellipses, seems ideally suited to a particular type of passionate love typified by novelty, absence, uncertainty. Conjugal love, powerful though it may be, lacks these particular qualities. Yet if the pleasure and even purpose of marriage lies in discovering freedom and self-realization within strictly prescribed limits, then lyric could well be seen as the genre most suited to marital love. This chapter examines the tradition of marriage lyric that has developed, for the most part, in recent centuries, as the ideal of loving, companionate marriage has spread. Taking as its starting point the work of the Victorian poet and theorist Coventry Patmore, whose treatise on poetic meter illustrates the same ideals that mark his poems about marriage, the chapter ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Seamus Heaney and other contemporary poets of marital love.
"If i had known our couple turned that way, i would not have stopped working" a biographical account of labour force participation and conjugal love