This is a book about ways of loving, under changing cultural, political, and economic circumstances, as expressed in poetry from Sir Philip Sidney to John Milton. I have chosen to begin it in the last decades of the sixteenth century and to end it a hundred years later, because this is an especially critical period of cultural transition – of transition in society generally and more particularly in prevailing attitudes toward love. When I began working on this book, I meant to limit it to secular love poetry in relation to cultural change. But poems, like facts, have a way of forcing their own terms on the reader. The result is a book that is somewhat less neat and orderly than I first intended, but hopefully truer to its subject. It ranges “downward” to consider such matters as the lovers' sexuality and material circumstances and “upward” to touch on their highest aspirations and ideals.

It proved simply too limiting not to consider the relations between secular and sacred love. Writers at the time thought there were important connections, as well as differences; indeed, it is hard to see how these two loves could fail to intersect in some way. Broadly defined, religious love is love to which people give – or believe they ought to give – the highest priority.