Poetry, an art form that is distinguished by rhythm, rhyme, intensity of feeling, compression, and the use of refrains, is as old as human civilization. It is widely believed that poetry originated in song. Preliterate societies used poetry to tell stories, record oral history and other forms of knowledge such as genealogy and law. Most of the world's scriptures are composed of poems rather than prose.
Poets have been writing about love from time immemorial. Their compositions, seeped in the many shades of love, encompass a gamut of intense bonds including friendship, romantic love, parental love, spiritual love, love of king and country, and love of nature.

100 Best Love Poems of All Time features some of the finest love poems written by masters of the form across the ages. Sappho, Horace, Ovid, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, Aphra Behn, John Keats, William Blake, WilliamWordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sara Teasdale, Sarojini Naidu, W.B. Yeats, and a host of other wordsmiths tug at the reader’s heartstrings in this collection.