If you need love poetry, Byron’s the perfect valentine

As well as the usual pink and red haze of cards, in Waterstone's this week I found 10 love poems in a pristine white envelope. Though mostly contemporary, they seem almost sweetly Victorian in the context of the modern Valentine's card. (Card shop Scribblers' touching selection ranges from: "F**k off, he's mine" to "You are gorgeous and you're not a bad shag either.")

The poems' editor Jenny Swann, however, gives a warning about the poetic approach to Valentine's Day, citing a flirty passage from Pride and Prejudice. "I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!" teases Elizabeth Bennet.

She has a point. It was French novelist Henry de Montherlant who first came up with the adage: "Happiness writes white, it doesn't show up on the page." Love poetry tends not to be euphoric: it is usually troubled, or tinged with sadness.

This year, thanks to the Poetry Archive sound library created by Andrew Motion, you can download and send an iValentine, a recorded love poem. But, as Motion concedes: "All poetry, including love poetry, is a kind of elegy: even when it establishes things permanently, and celebrates, it does so in a way that reminds us of transience. That's the beautiful and fundamental paradox."

We might think we'd like someone to write us sonnets but the reality can be different. Ted Hughes, for instance, admitted he could never understand Sylvia Plath's inclination to use their worst moments for inspiration.

Frank O'Hara did write reams of extravagantly adoring love poetry. But his muses were alarmed by the intensity of feelings provoked even by a first date. In You Are Gorgeous And I'm Coming — in which he rushes on the metro to meet his hot date — the first letter of each line spells out his date's name, Vincent Warren.

O'Hara's gleefulness is unusual: it's an emotion most poets struggle to express, at least in their work. Valentine's Day is an especially tough one for poets, schooled as they are to wage war on cliché.

Doing just this, one of my favourite anti-romance poems was written by Michael Donaghy, who found himself struggling to write a poem commissioned by radio for 14 February. He asks in Liverpool: Ever been tattooed? It takes a whim of iron/Like Tracy, who confessed she'd had hers done/One legless weekend with her ex/Heart. Arrow. Even the bastard's initials. RJL/Somewhere it hurt, she said/And when I asked her where, snapped "Liverpool".

So much great writing about love comes after the event, too. Poignantly, Antonia Fraser said this week that she wrote Must You Go? about Harold Pinter because of her sense that she "didn't want it to be over".

Writers of love poetry have long understood the possibility of communion with someone no longer there. WB Yeats was writing poetry about Maud Gonne years after their affair had ended. In the Long-Legged Fly, he writes of his hopeless love "in this lonely place".

But if, come Sunday, you are looking for a gleeful line of poetry, for all the dysfunctional chaos of his Olympian efforts as a seducer, Lord Byron is a great candidate.

"All who joy would win must share it. Happiness was born a Twin..." he wrote. Just don't tell your valentine anything about his love life.