Excerpt from Feminine Influence: On the Poets It would not, therefore, be surprising if a Greek or Roman letter were some day to be discovered to match Byron's: My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was, he says, the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. Love poetry can only exist where women have some freedom of choice, and where men therefore run the risk of refusal. When marriages are arranged, as in antiquity and the Middle Ages, by the parents, love poems are addressed only to courtesans and to women who have married some one else. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.