Well I led her – hunh –
To de altar – hunh;
And de preacher – hunh –
Give his command – hunh –
And she swore by – hunh –
God that made her – hunh;
That she’d never – hunh –
Love another man – hunh.

In his editing of the The New Faber Book of Love Poems, Fenton might be said to be focusing on the hunh, or the moments where language subsides under a surge of meaning. Many of the poems he has chosen have an exuberant sense of their own difficulty, of the uselessness of chat and the need to let music, image and gesture take charge. Auden observed that we break into song when we reach a level of feeling at which ordinary speech won’t do. When poets write about love, they too break into song, no matter how musical, or not, they were to begin with.

Fenton’s interest in the impulse towards song has led to a selection which directs us to listen differently to those we think we know well. The eight poems from Elizabeth Bishop, for example, start with two of the “Songs for a Colored Singer”, which turn up the volume of what follows; and Emily Dickinson takes on a blues rhythm, the dashes of her punctuation becoming a kind of hunh:

The Rose did caper on her cheek –
Her Boddice rose and fell –
Her pretty speech – like drunken men –
Did stagger pitiful –

English tends towards quiet music, but there is one liberating aspect of our language to which Fenton is particularly alert: “A sort of discretion on the part of our broad-minded grammar allows us to use the words I and You without specifying the gender of either the first or the second person”. Given that our interest in a love poem is ultimately about what it means in terms of ourselves, this vagueness about gender can encourage the reader. It also helps us to read feeling without characterization, such as the deep non-erotic intimacy described by Thom Gunn as the “stay of your secure firm dry embrace”. Fenton pays serious attention to this, as he does to the passion of friendship; and there is relatively little of the outright sensuality we find in the Elizabethan George Peele:

Whenas the rye reach to the chin,
And chopcherry, chopcherry ripe within,
Strawberries swimming in the cream . . .

The love poem is more likely than any other to have its starting point in the poet’s own experience, which gives it a particular quality, like the difference between history painting and self-portraiture or between looking at a sky on the computer screen and standing beneath it. At the same time, the best love poems are those in which we can watch the poet being seduced by the poem. However much circumstantial detail a poem retains, it has to become more than itself. Fenton points out that “Traditionally, love poetry is in favour of love’s success, and unconcerned with the morality of the liaisons it promotes”. Of course! These liaisons are not ours; we are interested in resonance and association rather than the fate of the poet.

Even a love poem is in conversation with poetry as much as it is with the loved one. In this anthology, the poets are arranged in alphabetical order, so that, as Fenton says, they “seem to speak to each other, and hear each other sing”; and so they do, whether by sudden proximity or new association – Bishop to Auden, Housman to Michael Drayton, Eliot to Marvell, John Fuller to Blake, Anne Bradstreet to John Donne. (“Anonymous” is lodged between Kingsley Amis and Simon Armitage; D. H. Lawrence gives way to “Lesbian Blues Lyrics of the 1920s”.) We can see by chance how Edith Wharton’s remarkable “Terminus”, with its “wide flare of cities”, picks up Whitman’s long line, his American sprawl, his “City of orgies, walks and joys”. But it is the choices Fenton has made within each body of work that make this such a delightfully surprising and provocative anthology. Bishop’s celebrated “The Shampoo”, which embeds the intimate act of washing a lover’s hair within universal connectedness is electrified to ambivalent effect in the subsequent “It is Marvelous”, where the lovers wake within a “bird-cage of lightning”. We may not think of Arnold, Eliot and Kipling as love poets, yet here they comfortably are, and it is instructive to read “Dover Beach” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in such a context. Other poets seem less convincing than usual. Browning and Byron are too theatrical, Elizabeth Barrett Browning too cerebral, and Lawrence plain smug:

Love is like a flower, it must flower and fade;
if it doesn’t fade, it is not a flower

The love poem has the advantage of rarely being satisfied with mere description; it has a job to do. While there are many of Donne’s “silken lines, and silken hooks” here, there is also the painful awareness of being mal-equipped, as suffered in Noël Coward’s “I Am No Good at Love” (“I kill the unfortunate golden goose / Whoever it may be / With over-articulate tenderness / And too much intensity”). Coward’s wit, like that of Wendy Cope (who immediately precedes him here), is unfailingly generous, and as he can turn his faults into a good song, he never quite relinquishes his dignity. Emotional clumsiness, when well expressed, can take on a kind of magnificence.

A peculiarly English retreat into ungainliness is demonstrated by Amis and John Betjeman (here cornered at his most panting) – and, sometimes, by Auden. These poets like to be helpless, too, and tend towards girlish submission as if to deodorize the slime of feeling. “Love”, in Pontefract, leaves Betjeman “winded, wilting, weak / and held in brown arms strong and bare / And wound with flaming ropes of hair”. Auden disarms us with his oafishness when what seem like clunking analogies are the precise rendering of clunking feelings. Like Larkin, he refuses the warm glow of romance without diminishing its imperative, which makes his straight-talking (“the truth about love”), all the more effective:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?

“Tune thy Music to thy Heart” says Campion, and it is often when the heart turns ugly, as in Shelley’s “Hate-Song”, that the music is at its most interesting:

A Hater he came and sat by a ditch,
And he took an old cracked lute;
And he sang a song which was more of a
screech
’Gainst a woman that was a brute.

And nothing, it seems, enrages the poet like a tepid response. Thomas Carew’s demand, “Give me more love, or more disdain”, echoes Aphra Behn’s “The Defiance”, in which the speaker is inflamed by some “trifling praise”.

We learn far more about the poets than we do about their subjects. Although the berated or accused lover may grow vivid, the milky presence of the adored is not nearly as interesting as the strategies the poet uses to captivate him or her. Inevitably, there is more poetry about yearning than there is about the joy of togetherness. Many, including Larkin and Lawrence, elide love and loss from the start, as the act of falling in love creates new forms of potential absence: “Like to a ring without a finger” (Anon), as opposed to a finger without a ring. And we, too, become absent. We lose ourselves in love, and so it is ourselves we look for in our lover, like the man in Paul Muldoon’s “Bran”, who in the face of a woman’s ecstasy will “weep” “for the boy on that small farm / Who takes an oatmeal Labrador / In his arms, / Who knows all there is of rapture”.

Timing is one of love poetry’s great subjects, and there are fine poems here of missing and colliding (though I missed, among others, Ezra Pound and Louis MacNeice). The act of co-ordination has become such a challenge in the contemporary world that the more recent work included seems to be built on the assumption that it is almost impossible to connect and stay connected. There is a further kind of dilution as the photograph and telephone substitute not only for presence and voice but for the imagined presence and voice.

In Fenton’s alphabetical arrangement, nothing gets stuck in its chronological rut except the music-hall cockney of Coward and Kipling. The shock of the modern is felt at the point where Meredith follows Marvell with excerpts from Modern Love and the “shuddering heap of pain” that enters the discourse along with psychology. The old constraints of gentillesse have been replaced by those of reasonableness, as if knowing why we, or those we love, behave like total bastards is enough. The hurt is supposed to evaporate once the imperative has been nailed. A knowing helplessness is the container in which most contemporary love poems are delivered. While Larkin usually presides, here it is the poems of W. D. Snodgrass (the “American Philip Larkin” according to Robert Lowell) that seem to use that packaging to deadliest effect.

As love poetry moves into the present, there is less talking and more thinking, despite our brave new vocabulary of feeling: poets may be more wary than most of its deceptiveness. Even so, the poem can impose a kind of emotional organization which is not there. As Donne puts it, “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms”, arranging the romantic furniture: so it is a relief when sonneteers are seen to struggle. Drayton’s “Nothing but no and I, and I and no” sums up the incoherence of being caught between the nature of love and the need to talk about it. It is the paired mirrors of anadiplosis, which Shakespeare, too, uses as a form of ricochet:

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What has thou then more than thou hadst
before?

If, then, we can only really talk about love by talking about something else, poetry ought to be its ideal vehicle. Even Auden, in “Heavy Date” and “Law Like Love”, gets caught in his own knots when trying to say it straight. Donne, Drayton and their contemporaries succeed by putting the image first, as if to say, “Don’t listen to this, look and feel”. There is an ease about the love poetry of the English Renaissance, which is unsurprisingly prominent in this book. Much of it gives the impression of being made out of shifting ingredients, at a time when language, form and the relationship between the poem and the poet were all wide open, giving the verse the resilience to integrate rhetoric and colloquialism, plain-speaking and impassioned registers, in a rare balance of argument and song.

In love, the points at which language and experience struggle to meet become gapingly evident. James Fenton seems to suggest that if anything can bridge the space between, it is the non-lexical or, as his assertively edited, utterly pleasurable anthology has it, the song:

Down in the valley, walking between,
Telling our story, here’s what it sings.
Here’s what it sings, dear, here’s what it
sings,
Telling our story, here’s what it sings . . . .

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Lavinia Greenlaw's novel, An Irresponsible Age, was published earlier this year. Her most recent collection of poems is Minsk, 2003.