Love Poems

The Roman poet Ovid (43BC-17AD) gives an ironic and parodic twist to love poetry in his highly original and entertaining explorations of sexual desire and its consequences. In his Amores (Loves, or Love Affairs) he partly celebrates, partly burlesques, the self-dramatising misery and 'slavery to love' that characterise the poet-lover of Roman erotic elegy. The Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) is a mock didactic poem, a self-help manual that teaches its readers how to achieve and retain erotic conquests. Offering methods to control what is definitively uncontrollable — namely, erotic desire — Ovid pursues all the ironies and paradoxes of his theme in this dazzling work. In Remedia Amoris (Cures for Love) the poet conceives desire as a disease curable by therapeutic advice. This translation of John Dryden (1631-1700) and his contemporaries in a style matchlessly suited to the originals.