MyTabstart > Favorites Directory > Poetry > Breaking Up A Relationship Poems
This TabStart page offers a curated selection of resources that feature poems that explore the end of relationships. Poetry is perhaps singularly capable of expressing the despair, anger, and sadness that can erupt when a relationship breaks up. There are also poems below that explore the process of moving on after a relationship has collapsed. Some of the authors whose work is featured below include W.D. Snodgrass, Elizabeth Bishop, and W.H. Auden.
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Poetry about a Relationship Breaking Up - This page from the New York Public Library presents three poems. Two of them focus on romance, and the other explores a relationship breaking up.
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Poems about Relationships Breaking Up & Vexed Love from the Poetry Found... - The Poetry Foundation offers this section on Break Ups & Vexed Love, which features more than 200 poems by distinguisged authors such as Stephane Mallarme, A.E. Housman, Ovid, William Shakespeare, and William Wordsworth.
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Poems for Break-Ups and Divorce from The Academy of American Poets - The Academy of American Poets contributes this lovely essay that cites and analyzes a number of poems that explore the heartache and grief of a relationship ending. Some of the works highlighted here include George Meredith's "Modern Love," Pablo Neruda's "If you forget me," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and Robert Lowell's "Man and Wife."
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"Breaking Up" - a Poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko - PoemHunter.com provides "Breaking Up" by the Soviet writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who was from Siberia. This sad verse contemplates a failed relationship.
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"I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run" - a Poem by Matthew H... - The Academy of American Poets presents "I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly or Even Run" by Matthew Harvey. In this cold, glum verse the narrator recounts a final drink with his former lover.
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"Leave Me, O Love, which Reachest But to Dust" - a Sonnet by Sir Philip ... - The Poetry Foundation presents "Leave Me, O Love, which Reachest But to Dust" by Sir Philip Sydney. This reflective sonnet uses brilliant imagery to express its aversion to love.
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"A Valediction" - a Poem by W.D. Snodgrass - Be sure to read W.D. Snodgrass's heartbreakingly snarky "A Valediction," in which the narrator discusses his lover leaving him for another.