There's many a two-line-stanza poem running around out there. Not every one of these is made of couplets. Many are just poems of stanzas rendered in two lines.
Nevertheless, two lines to the stanza, especially when those lines are long and rhythmically languid, make for the prettiest poems, er, the most elegant. And when they actually form specialized units of meaning, rhythm, repetition, including rhyme, they are especially elegant. Thinking of Pope here, of course. It's just something about the horizontal downward flow of the poem that makes it visually beautiful, in my experience.
Beautiful and well suited to love poetry, or at least light poetry; that is, not poetry that asks you necessarily to apologize for something or to march into the streets.
And so, Couplets, a first book, by Maggie Millner, out just in time for Valentine's Day and reviewed in today's New York Times.
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