Shakespeare on Love (Warbler Press Contemplations)

When in love, our heart overflows. Whether love is requited or remains a hope and dream, love compels us to express ourselves. This original collection, culled from William Shakespeare’s works, testifies to the essential link between love and language, between the experience of falling in love and the urge to express this unique feeling with our beloved and the world. Shakespeare’s inventiveness and facility with words is such that even brief lines seem to contain whole galaxies of meaning. This allows us to read the brilliant passages gathered in this book without needing the whole context—the way we can marvel at a gem mined from a vast mountain without accounting for all that compressed it into a spark of beauty. Since their first publication more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s lines describe the pangs, pains, and pleasure of love like no other writer before or after him.\nWilliam Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely considered the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s greatest dramatist.\nUlrich Baer holds a BA from Harvard and a PhD from Yale. A widely published author, he is University Professor at New York University, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Alexander von Humboldt fellowships. He has written numerous books on poetry, photography and cultural politics, and edited and translated Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Dark Interval, Letters on Life, and Letters to a Young Poet. He hosts leading writers and artists to talk about big ideas and great books on the Think About It podcast. In the Warbler Press Contemplations series, he has published: Dickinson on Love, Nietzsche on Love, Rilke on Love, Wilde on Love, and Shakespeare on Love.