A lot of greeting-card poetry gets exchanged on Valentine's Day, most of it veering toward bad jokes, the unimaginatively ribald, or all varieties of treacle—verbal counterparts to soundtracks of romantic dramas from the '70s. It's really ok if you just gave somebody a greeting card. All of us, seeking some genuine way to delight the people we love, have eventually felt those cards staring like little flags of surrender and unoriginality from their garish rows. In moments of weakness or futility, we purchase them. If this year you, too, found yourself among greeting-card perpetrators, then rest assured that there is still plenty of time. On the day after Valentine's, a whole new year on the romantic calendar stretches out before you. You still have options. And if your little card of romantic concession (as in "giving up," as in "concession stand")—if it was not particularly well received, well, chances for recovery still remain.

It is not too late to write that special someone your own poem, or, better, once given to her or him, their own poem in your words. You may instantly shrug off this suggestion, but even if you aren't currently in the questionable habit of writing poems, such a show of effort (that quality so lacking with greeting cards) and the recipient's most likely appreciative ears can make up for a whole host of lyrical sins. Or, barring that, you can give the gift of someone else's words, and sometimes, oftentimes, that is quite all right, too.

Consider, for example, former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's Valentines, a 2008 collection of poems written over many years and sent out annually as "public" valentines to numerous female friends. Eventually they became "friends" in the Facebook sense: these groups began as fifty readers and grew to twenty-five hundred. A single, additional poem is for Kooser's presumably easygoing wife. Or there is the aptly named Jean Valentine's Break the Glass, released last fall. The final series of poems, entitled "Lucy," represents love poetry of a certain sort: the poems address, rhapsodically at times, the remains (and idea of?) a hominid found in northern Ethiopa, whom locals most poetically named Dinkenesh, "You are beautiful." However fanciful, Valentine frequently shows heart in verbalizing her fascination and sympathy: "O god who transcends time, / let Lucy have a cup," one poem says, with that same care and wish for well-being that we all reserve for our loved ones.

The volume that may interest most this Valentine's week, though, is Love Poems by Pedro Salinas, a newly revised, reissued edition of Willis Barnstone's translation of Salinas' My Voice Because of You. Here's a sampling from that book's famous lines:

When you chose me—
love chose—
I came out of the great anonymity
from everyone, from nothing.
Till then
I was never taller than
the sierras of the world.
I never sank deeper
than the maximum
depths marked out
on maritime charts.
And my gladness was
sad, as small watches are
without a wrist to fasten to,
without a winding crown, stopped.
But when you said: you,
to me, yes, to me singled out,
I was higher than stars,
deeper than coral.

To those in love, love becomes the one worthiness, and even as lovers' give themselves over to the greater worth of the beloved, that love reciprocated more fully individuates.

Barnstone's highly readable version was originally published in 1976, and he has now combined it with Letter Poems to Katherine, poems so-called that he has culled and lineated from the Spanish poet's many prose letters to one Katherine Whitmore, a professor at Smith College. (Salinas himself worked in exile at Wellesley and later Johns Hopkins.) These letters, only discovered in recent years, now in Harvard's Houghton Library, and never before published in English, give crucial context to Salinas' famous book of love poetry. They have obvious importance for purposes of literary biography, but they also complicate the powerful lyrical relationship discernible in My Voice Because of You. They do so by setting a historical, biographical storyline beside the poems' nameless, placeless drama. What was thought to be an imaginative love for these many years now appears to be lyrical screen for Salinas' and Whitmore's relationship. Most obviously, this second, revealing set of letter poems adds a new dimension to some of the first sequence's best-known lines:

To live I don't want
islands, palaces, towers.
What steeper joy
Than living in pronouns!
Take off your clothing,
features, pictures;
I don't want you like that,
masked as another,
always a daughter of something.
I want you pure, free,
irreducible: you.

The beginning and ending of that final sentence explain the wish for pronouns. I. You. The whole world is found there. Traditionally critics have found Salinas' rather writerly focus on pronouns to be a comment on a desired intimacy, and a falling away of everything that is not the enraptured pair. The letter poems now disclose a different reason for this focus—pronouns allow the lovers' real, identifying names to remain concealed.

At this point I am reminded of Aaron Belz's strong concluding assertion when recently reviewing in Books & Culture the correspondence of another pair of lovers, the poets Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. They were better at writing, he said, than loving each other, or others. The same may ultimately be said of Salinas, whose ardor at least is unmistakable in poems and letters both. The passions and eventual disappointments of this married man's and father's fifteen-year relationship with Whitmore were not even entirely secret—Barnstone recalls how he first met the Salinas family in 1947, at Bread Loaf in Vermont. He heard about Whitmore from the poet's son, who eventually became one of Barnstone's closest, longtime friends. This biographical context has value, then, but it makes a rather mixed bag out of Salinas' love poems, doesn't it?

Say what you will, My Voice Because of You is indisputably full of love poetry. It is easy to regret Salinas' inspiration and the torment it caused him and the eventual discontentment of both lovers, but only precisians could deny the poetry's power, or refuse to encounter it on its own terms. Or rather we allow poems into our own lives and circumstances, and technically, into our very bodies when reciting their lines. We speak the poet's words and make them our own, make their dramas briefly our dramas. Salinas himself proffered a similar theory in a prologue to an earlier English translation: "Instead of dis-tracting or at-tracting us to another place, poetry turns us inward, invites us to an interior activity, asks us to reproduce in our own hearts what the poet is feeling." In providing a place of residence for poems, we also become their temporary landlords, and in that sense we take a readerly responsibility that personalizes the poems, lifting them from their originating circumstances. It is necessary to read deeply, all the more so, when writing preempts a consequence-free association with authors and contexts. To read responsibly is to hold in mind competing acknowledgments about what we read, all at the same time.

In other words, it takes a scorched-earth, gravely reduced sense of art and humans' engagement with it to assert that no future readers could find value in or have sympathy for these poems' emotional interrogations of love, their celebration of the beloved, and the wildly imagined effects upon the lover. Fortunately, most poetry readers dispense with pesky, personal details of composition with relative ease, if, that is, they have come to realize those details in the first place. That is fitting, for poetry rises far above what Philip Sidney called the "bare Was" of history. Nor, for worse or better, is Salinas hardly the first poet to create a memorable poetic sequence under, let's say, strange fits of passion. I have learned to anticipate students' frustration and puzzlement when they first hear about Gemma Donati. Who's she? Dante's real wife, who goes unmentioned in the Commedia. She awkwardly contrasts with Beatrice, the great poet's deceased love of his youth. Without bothering to explain himself, Dante sublimates Beatrice, not Gemma, into literary immortality. Even in the more biographically compromising Letter Poems to Katherine, we should still be able to admire the sentiment that Salinas writes in the margin of one 1934 letter, written from Madrid: "I'd like my poetry to serve you always."

Is there a lesson here? Maybe that love is messy, and even others' love gives us pause. The poetry about love can be messy, too. And still we love, or with great help, try our very best to, our imperfect best. And still people write poems about love, poems for those whom they love, and whose love has made them experience the world differently. One of my favorite, unexpected remarks along these humbled lines is found in a letter of 1941: "What a weird, unpredictable life!" Here Salinas sounds less like an esteemed professor and poet in exile, one from Spain's renowned Generation of '27, and more like a high schooler whose head's still spinning after the prom overnighter. My Voice Because of You also kneels to this sort of realist's outburst: "To love! What unequaled / confusion! How many errors!" Barnstone works against the original lineation ("¡Amar! Qué confusion / sin par!") to create an ironic effect in the English line break. We would like to think of love as unique, unparalleled, but not necessarily in its confusions and errors. Salinas continues a few lines later: "The two of us. What disasters! / Where's the road? Here, / there?"

Last week, as I walked along busy State Street in Chicago, on my way to resume this review, it was easy to encounter love in its myriad splendors, durabilities, entanglements, and vicissitudes. One man just ahead of me was talking angrily. It was even louder than your usual cell-phone call annoyingly overheard. He was saying that it was a ten-dollar pack of cigarettes he left there, and who did she think she was, and he would not put up with being mistreated that way. He used harsh names. Up the block, an older man and woman walking hand-in-hand were accosted by a fellow clearly trying to get them to sign up for something. "You two make the cutest couple!" he declared. "I bet you two were high-school sweethearts." For all I know, he may have gotten it just right, unctuousness and all. Shortly I turned left to check out a recommended restaurant—we were looking for a special place for my in-laws' upcoming visit, somewhere we could celebrate fittingly their thirty years of marriage.

I returned to State Street just in time to happen upon three young black men—three very gay black men, it seemed—emerge from the subway. Two were in a very heated quarrel that quickly sounded like more than just friends disagreeing. I don't know who you think you are, one said. Pointed speech. Arch gestures. His speech poured forth in one long, uninterrupted accusation, as with Gargantua's mouth. "You must think you're something by not telling me but I will have you know that you're dealing with the wrong man this time oh yes you are." All three men were dressed crisply, displaying a high urban fashion sense—low-rider designer jeans, beefy and tan suede boots, crisp collared shirts under puffy, shiny black winter coats, and cocked, custom-made baseball caps. But two of them clucking at each other like hurt lovers, too. It was quite a scene. The one yelling had an Armani gift bag on one arm, and soon the accused responded with even more passion, the Hollister shopping bag on his arm shaking a little. The third guy, looking every bit the third wheel, mainly stood between them and looked nervously neutral; he was somehow two people at once, retiring in aspect yet still flamboyant in his gait and accessorizing. And by that time, we were walking by the culture's most broadcast version of love—the tantalizing, almost gymnastical erotics of the American Apparel store's Valentine-themed window display, with its G-strings and chemises on colorless mannequins. Love as Business—and love always is a complicated business. Pedro Salinas' poetry can still enchant us and even speak for us today because it memorably registers that complexity, love's sweetness and valor, insanity and inconsistencies.

The original seventy poems of My Voice Because of You appeared in 1933. It was the first volume of an eventual trilogy of love-poetry collections, and stands as one of the great sequences of modern European poetry. "He wrote his Song of Songs in the twentieth century," Barnstone suggests, thereby placing Salinas' lyric poems in the tradition of Saint John of the Cross' Spiritual Canticle and Fray Luis de León's translation of the Bible's greatest love poetry. Salinas' language is sometimes charged and elaborate, reflecting the influences of Spain's Baroque authors and more recent Symbolist poetry, and at other times piercingly straightforward. To illustrate this second aspect, consider the speaker upon seeing trains pass by:

They would take me where
I've never been. But I
don't want new skies.
I want to be where I was.
With you, to be back.
What an immense newness
to go back again, […]

Sometimes the speaker's urgency seems to have been so great that he couldn't be bothered to work up a poetic conceit: "I would drop everything, / toss it all away: / costs, catalogues, / … / You, who are not my love, / if you called me!" There are other sweetly pedestrian moments, such as quick consideration between a kiss on the lips and one on the forehead, that "hardness / behind the flesh, / stiff, eternal, inflexible answer[.]" Some of the casualness derives from Salinas' fascination with technology, although he could not have imagined the extent to which we now identify ourselves, announce our "relationship statuses," and interact with potential mates via our gadgets. Twice in his introduction Barnstone speaks of these poems as "telephone meditations" or "telephonic." "Telegraph wires" do appear in the sequence, but upon further thought, it is the peculiar nature of our phone voices and conversations, which others here more of now than ever before, that makes some poems feel so familiar, so easily heard. "How long have we been talking?" one poem begins. "Who began it? I don't know." Lovers do fill the air between them in this way, but each hears in the other's voice the speech of Demosthenes, the romance of Rostand. Elsewhere the poetry grows more elaborate, and playfully melodramatic, in the spirit of Salinas' great Spanish predecessor Góngora. Sometimes the compositions seem misleadingly plainspoken, but notice the concentrating effect of the repetitions here, and how they foreground the last phrase:

I need that day
each day tell me
it is day, that it is
day and night: and you there.

Less subtly, here's the poet at his most whimsical:

O how I would like to see
sand, sun, in summer!
So you might lie down
refreshed to relax.
So when you go you might leave me
your body as a tender
warm unforgettable print.

Random, yes, but also looking back to mighty predecessors—Dido cherishing the imprint on the divan where the departed Aeneas has lain, or the desire drawn from John Donne's roving, blood-commingling flea.

For all of these ecstasies, the speaker frequently suffers from his disorientation (the word "ecstasy," after all, means "out of the body"). In the above vein of levity, the speaker begs the mirror to "get me away from her. / … / Make her—who fills the world—/ make her minute, minimal." He seems to pass through his own funhouse here, while elsewhere he more darkly recognizes a great vulnerability in loving the adored: "To surrender / darkly to the great certainty / that another being, outside me, remote / is living me." Sometimes he can savor this dependence ("To you / I'd like to owe it all"), but more palpably this uncertainty brings an attendant pain that never vanishes: does she truly see me, he worries, is her love as real as my own? "My only lover now always, / and I beside you without you. / I alone with the truth." Constantly, therefore, the lover is harmed by his own extravagant idealizations; he cannot resist his imaginative flights, yet realizes that to make of his beloved a Dulcinea from Don Quixote is to settle for no real, sustainable love. Willfulness toward the lover can also verge on violence: "Forgive the hurting, at times. / It's that I want to take out / of you the best you." Like a dictatorial Cupid, the lover here displays a dangerously assured imperiousness. As the relationship deteriorates, the speaker is even grateful for his lingering pain. Salinas provides a more intensified version, by addressing the pain itself, of what sympathetic mothers lilt—better to have loved and lost than never loved at all—whenever a heart-broken teenager, recently broken up with, lies raw and saddened on the family sofa: "I don't want you to go, / pain, last form / of loving. // … you stick with me. / Your truth assures me / that nothing was a lie." What remains, then, is a welcomed hell: " 'We had so much to say, and so much / still left us for us!' " The letter writer, the one closer to the real Salinas, we suppose, also accepts this state. If life sometimes cuts him in two, he writes in a 1933 note, so much the better. "I'll live in the wound," he writes. Despite the tonal and emotional variety in My Voice Because of You, Salinas claims in later letters that the book was an "inspiring collaboration" that featured, for him, "poems of pure / and happy love."

The sequence's final poem argues differently. It laments the "disheveled terrible beasts" that beg for realities. These beasts are the lovers' shadows, enlarging as the pair grows apart and forges "this great bed of distances." It all leads to the book's famous final lines about how love invents its infinity, but does so in a problematic place—"esta corporeidad mortal y rosa." That promise of the infinite hollowly sounds, following so quickly after the admission of a "mortal body." The poet and poem are left needing some love that is greater than what has been conceived in this book.

It should be clear by now that lovers of, and those who give lovers gifts of, Pablo Neruda's poetry will be among the most keen to discover Salinas. His love poetry survives comparison with Neruda's greatest amorous books—Twenty Love Poems and One Desperate Song, The Captain's Verses (written with "furious blood," the poet said), and One Hundred Sonnets of Love. That last volume (its paperback is a shiny hot pink, prepare yourself) has for its frontispiece a priceless, grainy photo of Neruda hugging his longtime wife and romantic inspiration Matilde with a wonderfully boyish, utterly self-satisfied grin. It is as if he has tricked the entire world when Matilde simply deigned to choose him. Nevertheless, they are each other's. My favorite Neruda love poem eschews the surrealistic or visionary sweeps and Whitmanian utterances for which he is often celebrated. It's called "Finale," and it appears at the end of The Sea and the Bells, which was one of several books Neruda worked on in 1973, the year of his death. He knew he was dying. At one point he writes the following: Fue tan bello vivir / cuando vivías. "It was beautiful to live / when you lived."

A few years ago, a mentor in graduate school asked me to offer a reading on his behalf at a classmate's wedding, which he could not attend. He requested something from Edmund Spenser's "Epithalamion," that highly crafted wedding song to the poet's wife. This poem, in which each intricate stanza commemorates a single hour of their special day, is the greatest of its sort, and arguably one of the finest in English literature. And yet, it was hard to find a few lines that would not have sounded absurd, or downright rude, in the context of a 21st-century wedding in New Jersey. "Lo! where she comes along with portly pace / Like Phoebe from her chamber of the East." Portly pace? I mean, really? Love poetry, if it is to stay truly genuine, must speak the heart's speech. I managed to read a few lines from Spenser, but ended with that single statement by Neruda. And so that day saw beginnings and endings both.

Maybe this book by Salinas sounds like the Valentine's gift you should have given your significant other in the first place. It is a gift made all the more intriguing by real-life turbulences and misgivings. They do not deplete the writing of its poetic powers, but they do remain stubbornly behind the poems' exalted declarations. That's as it should be. This interrelationship of life and verse is more fully disclosed now in Barnstone's augmented new edition of Salinas' love poetry. And just maybe this very review might serve as an improved-upon Valentine in its own right—poor man's gift, modest offering, day late. Yet made with effort, meaningfully given, and meant for that one person who makes me so quick to recognize for myself, in that photo of Pablo Neruda and Matilde, the poet's stupid-happy expression of being most fortunate in enjoying her favor and yet undeserving of it. That person knows who she is, and I am most fortunate because I know who she is, too.

Brett Foster is assistant professor of English at Wheaton College. His first collection of poems, The Garbage Eater, is coming in April from Northwestern University Press.

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