A Valentine from Four Distinguished Writers Talking About Our Favorite Emotion.

In a way, love is a writer's only subject, though it usually is disguised by, or filtered through, such matters as war, rebellion, heroism, zeal, ambition, madness, avarice, grief, wonder, innocence, shame and so forth. Under every subject a writer deals with lies love of someone or of something. Even when no motive for writing shows—and in the best works or art it ought not to—still, most writers are out to make the world worth loving. Don't you think? This is the sort of question Erica Jong, Paul Muldoon and Roger Rosenblatt tossed to one another, with Valentine's Day around the corner, in a free-wheeling discussion among celebrated writers whose fiction, essays and poems have made them beloved themselves. Romantic love, parental love, love of friends, of nature, of love itself—every angle and permutation examined, embraced and knocked about. What's not to love. Oh, did we fail to mention sex?