Art and Contemporary Love Poetry

What role does art play in contemporary love poetry? There are those who might suggest that love poetry plays no role at all, as to them, art and contemporary love poet are two totally distinct and separate entities, In reality, the contemporary love poet has always played a legitimate and unique role in literary art, throughout the course of history, and still does today.

Art itself can serve as an inspiration for the contemporary love poet, or looking at art from a different perspective, the contemporary love poet  becomes a literary artist who paints with words and expressions that are unique to his or her own era. 

Is the contemporary love poet destined to be an artist like Michael Angelo focusing on form and beauty, or more like Picasso with the  unusual depths of contortion and distortion in his artwork? Does the contemporary love poet write more like Caravaggio with the focus on highlights of light in the midst of total darkness?

All three are probably true. The perfection, purity and beauty of nature are more than sufficient to inspire a poetic work like those Michael Angelo. The horror and chaos of war could prove inspirational for a Picasso type of contemporary love poetry. The divine-human contrast of the light and dark could result in a Caravaggio type of contemporary love poetry.

Words and expressions are elusive at best and may suddenly thwart the best attempts of the contemporary love poet to complete a piece of poetic artwork, at any time. Words can be frustrating and fail to express what a contemporary love poet wants to express in any era, including the present, or they can do exactly the opposite.

It may be the contemporary love poet who writes in the next era, that enlarges or expands poetic horizon in terms of verbiage or expression and thus is able to write in a way that makes sense and somehow helps to sort out the literary fragments of previous poetic art.

Sometimes, many eras can pass before a missing fragment links the pieces of contemporary love poetry in a fuller, artistic sense, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A contemporary love poet of any era may stand amazed, amused or confounded to learn that he or she is regarded or labeled as a literary artist, even though it is likely to be an apt depiction of his or her poetic endeavor.

One may ask which came first, the words and expressions used by the contemporary love poet, or the portrait of the time it manifests. Perhaps there are times when both are true. One may precede the other in either instance knowing that they invariably work in conjunction with one another.

Writing contemporary love poetry is a poetic art form in every era, and similarly, art in any of its possible forms can serve as an inspiration for a contemporary love poet.