Through close reading of the work of Sidney, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Carew and Milton, Anthony Low argues that cultural, economic and political change transformed the way poets from Sidney to Milton thought and wrote about love. He shows how poets struggled to invent a form of love in harmony with the changing world. Sacred love, cut off from old traditions under cultural change, took on surprising new forms. Mutual or married love carried increasingly difficult burdens for lovers seeking shelter from loneliness or accomodation with a threatening world.