Venus and Adonis

Poems of renunciation, absence and love that was refused or arrived too late. The fullest collection of a poet who wrote about loss with unusual restraint.

Christina Rossetti

Songs of parting and love that did not last, written to be sung. Burns wrote the lines people still quote when they say goodbye.

Robert Burns

Decades of poems shaped by one love that was never returned. Yeats made a lifetime of work out of being refused.

William Butler Yeats