Love Poem With Toast

“Love Poem with Toast” (2008) is a short poem by the American poet Miller Williams, published by LSU Press in the collection titled Time and the Tilting Earth. Highly representative of Williams’s style, the poem touches on “grand” subjects such as love, death, and desire in a casual, conversational, and at times humorous tone. Williams weaves together various American and English poetic traditions to take the reader into the mind of a speaker ruminating on the nature of human wants and desires, all while sitting across the table from their lover eating toast.

Like much of Williams’s poetry, “Love Poem with Toast” finds a home somewhere between Modernist and Contemporary American poetry. His irregular use of rhyme and lack of meter, for instance, is a form of free verse that traces back to Walt Whitman, the so-called “Father of American Free Verse.” Instead of adhering to a strict form, Williams creates his own rhythm in the poem by making use of poetic devices such as repetition,

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