If I have spent more time in this book on the problems of love than on its glories, that may be partly owing to my focus on the ways that cultural change and responding psychological adjustments exert pressure on us. Change is difficult. But an additional reason may be that, in tracing shifts in attitudes and assumptions about love as revealed in a selection of poems spanning a century of transformation, I have sometimes deliberately leaned toward sympathy with earlier rather than later attitudes. We ourselves are the (largely unconscious) products of many of the changes I have discussed, so that our natural bias is toward the present rather than the past. That is more true now than ever, as political deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion have largely replaced the nostalgic admiration for past customs and practices that characterized many critics of an earlier generation.

As I noted in the introduction, readers are inevitably free to prefer their present viewpoints to those of anyone in the past – and, of course, they are overwhelmingly likely to do so. So I have chosen sometimes to swim against the tide of postmodernist culture and criticism. That is, I have sometimes remarked on what is valuable in assumptions we have lost sight of as our attitudes toward love have changed, as well as on – what will be more obvious to most readers today – what we may have gained by those changes.