Are men more romantic than women? Most of the great love poetry is by men. Browning, Yeats, Shakespeare and?

Question

Lord Byron, not to mention Shelley. With a name like Percy Bysshe, what choice did he have. Also, modern poet Frank Labaty deserves to be put among those. Women write romance novels, but men have written timeless romantic poetry. Which tugs more at the heart strings?

I meant Robert Browning, although his wife was no slouch at romantic poetry herself. I am not trying to be sexist. I am just trying to stir up debate.

I forgot to mention John Keats(Ode to a Grecian Urn). Like many romantics he died young.

Answer 1

It's really hard to top William S:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Such lovely words make me melt like butter.

I don't read romance novels either unless you mean classics like "Pride and Prejudice" or "Emma." I think the love poetry and the novels represent different aspects of romance.
Women long to be wanted and fought for, they want to share in the adventure of life with a man, and they want their beauty to be unveiled. The romance stories usually fall along these lines: the Beauty waiting to be rescued by the Hero.
Men are made for battle - they need something in life to fight for. They have a deep longing for adventure and a Beauty to rescue. I think the love poetry reflects the man's intense pursuit of his Love.
If we put them together - voila! The strength of the man and his pursuit draws out the woman's beauty and allows her heart to flourish. Her beauty then inspires him to be her strong hero. I mean really, if a man said what William S wrote in Sonnet 116 to me I would feel so beautiful and feminine. He would definitely be my hero, my handsome prince, and my undying devotion and passion would make him feel like everything he ever wanted to be.
Is this my life? Oh, heck no. Why do you think I don't read romance novels?
But this is what I see in the poetry and the novels. Man and woman loving and living as it was meant to be.

Answer 2

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RE:
Are men more romantic than women? Most of the great love poetry is by men. Browning, Yeats, Shakespeare and?
Lord Byron, not to mention Shelley. With a name like Percy Bysshe, what choice did he have. Also, modern poet Frank Labaty deserves to be put among those. Women write romance novels, but men have written timeless romantic poetry. Which tugs more at the heart strings?

Answer 3

Pav86ru is right: Women were not recognized as poets for millenia, partly because they were too busy taking care of household duties and/or children, and at times because they didn't know how to read and write and only recently gained educational rights -- and not even in all countries!

I do think men are more romantic. Women are more practical by nature because it falls more to the woman to raise children, and women are more about survival and practicality. Men can spout sweet nothings and court a woman, get into her pants, father children and then leave, and keep doing this well into their old age.

I don't think it's completely fair to say that one gender is any more X or less Y than the other. Obviously there are always going to be exceptions, since human beings are all over the place. Romance is a human invention, and both men and women may be romantically inclined, but they may show their preferences and romantic ways differently.

Safer to say, though, that because literary history privileged the voices of men over women, due to inequalities in voting politics, social politics and gender politics, it does look like men are the more "romantic" of the sexes. But this is a false measurement because women have yet to catch up since we were disenfranchised for centuries, if not millenia, and complete literacy and complete equality is not worldwide even now in the 21st century.

As for which tugs more at the heartstrings, this also needs to be balanced against the times we live in. In the past, poetry was more widely known. It was not until the mid-19th century that the paperback was even invented (thanks to Charles Dickens) and only in the 20th century did the modern publishing industry get its start. Remember too, that affordable, available birth control has only been available since the 1960s.

Ultimately, what tugs at the heartstrings is going to be different from person to person. Not everyone likes or understands poetry. Quite a huge proportion of romance novels are pulp. What stands the test of time and gets put into the canon is any work that reaches everyone, no matter the age, and which has a message that is timeless, real and true, and can be adapted to every generation. And the only way to tell what gets into the canon is to wait about 100 years or so!

So don't make any judgments too soon about which gender is better, because of the inequalities throughout history. Don't make any judgments too soon about which genre is more powerful. Everyone has his/her favorites. Study the canon to get a taste of the classics, then read where your heart and mind take you. You can't go too wrong from there.

Cheers, K (teacher, forever college student, and reader)

Answer 4

Which Browning? The one I associate with romantic poetry was a woman.

Yeats? You call the Crazy Jane poems romantic?

"Take the sour
If you take me,
I can scoff and lour
And scold for an hour."
"That's certainly the case,' said he.

Seriously -- I think it is about 50-50. There would be more examples of great love poetry from the 16th through 18th century if women had been allowed to publish.

(as for Yeats -- "When You Are Old" is one of the great love poems -- so I was just kidding there -- and anyone who knows Robert Browning knows he could do it, too).

Answer 5

i think women are more romantic than men. Im not saying this because I'm a woman. It's just that women writers' works are usually undervalued because the author is a 'girl'.that's a fact not an opinion. Some female authors have decided to use masculine pen names in order for the readers to focus more on the quality of their work not the gender of the author.

Answer 6

Uuwushdhre

Answer 7

Not necessarily. It's just that back then... women had no rights... so it would have been kind of hard to get things published for them, wouldn't it? And most of them probably didn't write because they probably thought they were worthless and they had no confidence because of the male dominated society.

Answer 8

Shakespeare? Well, during his time, women weren't even ALLOWED to act on stage.

Answer 9

well we can not generalize but some men are more romantic than women and some women are more romantic than man

Answer 10

you cant use poetry as an example because women were not recongnised as poets for many many years and used male sudanyms