Marriage Poems

A sparkling collection of poems about virtually every aspect of matrimony: courtships and weddings, adulteries and separations, domestic harmony, wedded bliss. Here are marriages made in many cultures and eras, delightfully evoked by poets ranging from Shakespeare to Omar Khayyam to D.H. Lawrence and Mona Van Duyn. From the rapturous infatuation of theSong of Songsto Ovid's cynical advice on 'The Art of Deceiving a Husband,' no facet of the matrimonial state remains unexplored.

John Hollander is the author of seventeen previous books of poetry. His first, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W. H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has written eight books of criticism, including the award-winning Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse and The Work of Poetry, and edited or coedited twenty-two collections, among them The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, and (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls.

Mr. Hollander attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has taught at Connecticut College and Yale, and was a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale. In 1990 he received a MacArthur Fellowship .