Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (Bloomsbury Poetry Classic) - Hardcover

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints-I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!-and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Bloomsbury Poetry Classics are selections from the work of some of our greatest poets. The series is aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist and carries no critical or explanatory apparatus. This can be found elsewhere. In the series the poems introduce themselves, on an uncluttered page and in a format that is both attractive and convenient. The selections have been made by the distinguished poet, critic, and biographer Ian Hamilton.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born in 1806. A semi-invalid for most of her early live, she won a great reputation with the appearance of her Poems (1844). The book attracted the admiration of Robert Browning, who secretly courted her for two years before the couple's celebrated elopement to Italy in 1846. In Italy, Elizabeth's health improved; she threw herself into European politics and wrote what is perhaps her best-known work, Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). She died in 1861, and her Last Poems appeared in that same year.