Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
    The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
    The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present
    Ebook401 pages3 hours

    The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present

    By David Lehman

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality.

    These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy.

    David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy.

    In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing.

    This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateFeb 5, 2008
    ISBN9781416564409
    The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present

    Read more from David Lehman

    Related to The Best American Erotic Poems

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How Instagram Saved Poetry

      Oct 15, 2018

      How Instagram Saved Poetry
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Poet’s Craft

      Jan 1, 2020

      To begin with a definition: A poem is a text structurally constrained by the repetition of any language element(s). The continuum of poetic constraint is extensive, stretching from operations that a reader will find completely imperceptible to overwh

      9 min read

    • Article

      Kendra Allen

      Mar 9, 2021

      Foreskin. A default setting. midnight. Dry eyes. Hesitation at an intersection. Premature adulthood. sheets. Freelancing. Yes maybe. knuckles. Hypervigilance. Corn stubs A sucked-in stomach. Syncing. Infantile embroidery. Showtime. The next step. Pri

      1 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Dec 7, 2021

      He wouldin case of divorcelay claim to halfof everythinghe said.Half a sofa,half a TV,half a summerhousehalf a pound of butterhalf a child. The apartment was hishe saidbecause it was in his name.The thing washe loved her. She loved anotherwhose wife

      2 min read

    • Article

      Something For Everyone

      Mar 4, 2021

      Segora International Writing Competitions 2021 has categories for poetry, short stories, vignettes and one-act plays. The annual creative writing contest is run by Poetry Prose and Plays. • Poetry: Enter original, unpublished poems up to 50 lines. Th

      1 min read

    • Article

      The 11 Best Elizabeth Bishop Poems

      Jun 28, 2019

      She published only 100 poems in her lifetime and yet is still considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century. The post The 11 Best Elizabeth Bishop Poems appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Writing Contest Success Stories

      Apr 13, 2022

      IF QUIET toil is the bread and butter of the writing life, then winning a writing contest is its three-scoop sundae with nuts, hot fudge, and a cherry. Coming in first, rising to the top: These notions feel distant to the arduous work of crafting poe

      5 min read

    • Article

      Restless Herd

      Apr 14, 2021

      Restless Herd
      21 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      (Residue, cellophane, liquid amber, pearl resin on cardboard) Platinum blonde, with whiteboxes of Russianchocolates. Silver liquid glitter,lemon candle, crimsonleather 1970 Mercedessedan interior. Gum drops, fox fur, creamblouse with gold specksand t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems

      Nov 1, 2021

      I spent all my avocado moneyby the light of Saint Martin de PorresI often think about bank robberyWhat wig I would wear, what fun it would beto harm no one and dump a million dollarsover the hills that belong to everyonefrom an airplane that I teach

      1 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year

      Jan 3, 2019

      Poetry Rx: This Is the Year
      7 min read

    • Article

      Clarice Lispector’s Children’s Story Taught Me to Read Her Like An Adult

      Mar 17, 2017

      Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar was asked to write an introduction to the translated edition of Clarice Lispector’s final novel Breath of Life. Instead of a formal introduction, his refusal letter was published and said this of Lispector’s work: “Each phra

      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Best American Erotic Poems

    4/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Best American Erotic Poems - David Lehman

      ALSO BY DAVID LEHMAN

      POETRY

      When a Woman Loves a Man

      The Evening Sun

      The Daily Mirror

      Valentine Place

      Operation Memory

      An Alternative to Speech

      Day One

      NONFICTION

      The Last Avant-Garde:

      The Making of the New York School of Poets

      The Big Question

      The Line Forms Here

      Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man

      The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection

      COLLABORATIONS

      Poetry Forum (with Judith Hall)

      Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins)

      EDITED BY DAVID LEHMAN

      The Best American Poetry (series editor)

      The Oxford Book of American Poetry

      Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

      The KGB Bar Book of Poems (with Star Black)

      Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms:

      85 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems

      James Merrill: Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger)

      Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery

      SCRIBNER POETRY

      A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

      1230 Avenue of the Americas

      New York, NY 10020

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      Copyright © 2008 by David Lehman

      Introduction copyright © 2008 by David Lehman

      All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

      SCRIBNER POETRY and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2007047100

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-6440-9

      ISBN-10: 1-4165-6440-3

      Visit us on the World Wide Web:

      http://www.SimonSays.com

      CONTENTS

      Introduction by David Lehman

      [organized chronologically by year of poet’s birth]

      FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780–1843)

      On a Young Lady’s Going into a Shower Bath

      EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

      Song [I saw thee on thy bridal day]

      WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

      I Sing the Body Electric

      GEORGE HENRY BOKER (1823–1890)

      from Sonnets: A Sequence on Profane Love

      EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)

      Come slowly—Eden! (#211)

      Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (#249)

      He fumbles at your Soul (#315)

      I groped for him before I knew (#1555)

      In Winter in my Room (#1670)

      EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887)

      Assurance

      EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)

      Terminus

      ROBERT FROST (1874–1963)

      The Subverted Flower

      AMY LOWELL (1874–1925)

      Anticipation

      GERTRUDE STEIN (1874–1946)

      from Lifting Belly

      WALLACE STEVENS (1879–1955)

      Peter Quince at the Clavier

      WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883–1963)

      Young Sycamore

      CONRAD AIKEN (1889–1973)

      Sea Holly

      EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892–1950)

      Sonnet [I too beneath your moon, almighty Sex]

      E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962)

      as /we lie side by side/my little breasts […]

      H. PHELPS PUTNAM (1894–1948)

      Sonnets to Some Sexual Organs

      HART CRANE (1899–1932)

      Episode of Hands

      LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)

      Desire

      KENNETH REXROTH (1905–1982)

      from The Love Poems of Marichiko

      W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973)

      The Platonic Blow

      ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979)

      It Is Marvellous…

      J. V. CUNNINGHAM (1911–1985)

      It Was in Vegas

      TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911–1983)

      Life Story

      MURIEL RUKEYSER (1913–1980)

      What I See

      MAY SWENSON (1913–1989)

      A New Pair

      ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER (1915–1981)

      The Milkman

      RUTH STONE (born 1915)

      Coffee and Sweet Rolls

      THOMAS McGRATH (1916–1990)

      from Letter to an Imaginary Friend

      ROBERT DUNCAN (1919–1988)

      The Torso (Passage 18)

      CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920–1994)

      Hunk of Rock

      HAYDEN CARRUTH (born 1921)

      Assignment

      RICHARD WILBUR (born 1921)

      A Late Aubade

      JAMES SCHUYLER (1923–1991)

      A photograph

      LOUIS SIMPSON (born 1923)

      Summer Storm

      ROBIN BLASER (born 1925)

      2nd Tale: Return

      KENNETH KOCH (1925–2002)

      To Orgasms

      A. R. AMMONS (1926–2001)

      Their Sex Life

      PAUL BLACKBURN (1926–1971)

      The Once-Over

      ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997)

      Love Poem on Theme by Whitman

      JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995)

      Peeled Wands

      FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966)

      To the Harbormaster

      DAVID WAGONER (born 1926)

      Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love

      GALWAY KINNELL (born 1927)

      Last Gods

      DONALD HALL (born 1928)

      When I Was Young

      ANNE SEXTON (1928–1974)

      December 11th

      RICHARD HOWARD (born 1929)

      Move Still, Still So

      ADRIENNE RICH (born 1929)

      (The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

      SYLVIA PLATH (1932–1963)

      The Beekeeper’s Daughter

      JOHN UPDIKE (born 1932)

      Fellatio

      MARK STRAND (born 1934)

      The Couple

      TED BERRIGAN (1934–1983)

      Dinner at George & Katie Schneeman’s

      RUSSELL EDSON (born 1935)

      Conjugal

      LUCILLE CLIFTON (born 1936)

      to a dark moses

      FREDERICK SEIDEL (born 1936)

      Heart Art

      MARGE PIERCY (born 1936)

      Salt in the Afternoon

      C. K. WILLIAMS (born 1936)

      Ethics

      CHARLES SIMIC (born 1938)

      Breasts

      BILLY COLLINS (born 1941)

      Pinup

      STEPHEN DOBYNS (born 1941)

      Desire

      ROBERT HASS (born 1941)

      Against Botticelli

      LINDA GREGG (born 1942)

      Kept Burning and Distant

      SHARON OLDS (born 1942)

      The Sisters of Sexual Treasure

      LOUISE GLÜCK (born 1943)

      The Encounter

      SANDRA ALCOSSER (born 1944)

      By the Nape

      PAUL VIOLI (born 1944)

      Resolution

      ROBERT OLEN BUTLER (born 1945)

      Walter Raleigh, courtier and explorer, beheaded by King James I, 1618

      ALAN FELDMAN (born 1945)

      A Man and a Woman

      BERNADETTE MAYER (born 1945)

      First turn to me…

      HONOR MOORE (born 1945)

      Disparu

      STAR BLACK (born 1946)

      The Evangelist

      ELLEN BASS (born 1947)

      Gate C22

      AI (born 1947)

      Twenty-Year Marriage

      JANE KENYON (1947–1995)

      The Shirt

      YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (born 1947)

      Lust

      MOLLY PEACOCK (born 1947)

      She Lays

      JAMES CUMMINS (born 1948)

      The Body Is the Flower

      HEATHER McHUGH (born 1948)

      Gig at Big Al’s

      LYNN EMANUEL (born 1949)

      Dreaming of Rio at Sixteen

      DENIS JOHNSON (born 1949)

      Poem

      DANA GIOIA (born 1950)

      Alley Cat Love Song

      PAUL JONES (born 1950)

      To His Penis

      WILLIAM WADSWORTH (born 1950)

      The Snake in the Garden Considers Daphne

      MARC COHEN (born 1951)

      It Never Happened

      JUDITH HALL (born 1951)

      In an Empty Garden

      CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON (born 1951)

      from Shot Up in the Sexual Revolution (The True Adventures of Suzy Creamcheese)

      PAUL MULDOON (born 1951)

      The Little Black Book

      BOB FLANAGAN (1952–1996)

      from Slave Sonnets [I’ve been a shit and I hate fucking you now]

      DORIANNE LAUX (born 1952)

      The Shipfitter’s Wife

      PETER SERCHUK (born 1952)

      The Naked Women

      DENNIS COOPER (born 1953)

      After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade

      MARK DOTY (born 1953)

      Lilacs in NYC

      TONY HOAGLAND (born 1953)

      Visitation

      RICHARD JONES (born 1953)

      Wan Chu’s Wife in Bed

      HARRYETTE MULLEN (date of birth unknown)

      Pretty Piece of Tail

      KIM ADDONIZIO (born 1954)

      The Divorcée and Gin

      SARAH ARVIO (born 1954)

      Mirrors

      DEAN YOUNG (born 1955)

      Platypus

      AMY GERSTLER (born 1956)

      Ode to Semen

      SARAH MACLAY (born 1956)

      My Lavenderdom

      CECILIA WOLOCH (born 1956)

      Bareback Pantoum

      CATHERINE BOWMAN (born 1957)

      Demographics

      ED SMITH (1957–2005)

      Poem

      NIN ANDREWS (born 1958)

      How to Have an Orgasm: Examples

      CARL PHILLIPS (born 1959)

      I See a Man

      DENISE DUHAMEL (born 1961)

      House-Sitting

      ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (born 1962)

      At Seventeen

      OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS (born 1963)

      Francesca Says More

      BETH GYLYS (born 1964)

      Preference

      LISA WILLIAMS (born 1966)

      On Not Using the Word ‘Cunt’ in a Poem

      DEBORAH LANDAU (born 1967)

      August in West Hollywood

      JEFFREY McDANIEL (born 1967)

      When a man hasn’t been kissed

      RICHARD SIKEN (born 1967)

      Little Beast

      JENNIFER L. KNOX (born 1968)

      Another Motive for Metaphor

      JANICE ERLBAUM (born 1969)

      The Temp

      JENNY FACTOR (born 1969)

      Misapprehension

      CATE MARVIN (born 1969)

      Me and Men

      CATHERINE WAGNER (born 1969)

      Lover

      C. DALE YOUNG (born 1969)

      Maelstrom

      BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY (born 1970)

      Voluptuary

      KEVIN YOUNG (born 1970)

      Étude

      JILL ALEXANDER ESSBAUM (born 1971)

      On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica

      BETH ANN FENNELLY (born 1971)

      Why We Shouldn’t Write Love Poems, or If We Must, Why We Shouldn’t Publish Them

      TERRANCE HAYES (born 1971)

      Preface

      CATHERINE WING (born 1972)

      Eye-Fucked

      ROSS MARTIN (born 1973)

      Body Cavity

      SARAH MANGUSO (born 1974)

      Reverence

      RAVI SHANKAR (born 1975)

      Lucia

      LAURA CRONK (born 1977)

      From the Other

      DANIELLE PAFUNDA (born 1977)

      Courtesy

      MICHAEL QUATTRONE (born 1977)

      February

      MAGGIE WELLS (born 1977)

      Sonnet from the Groin

      NOAH MICHELSON (born 1978)

      Valentine

      HEATHER CHRISTLE (born 1980)

      Letter to My Love

      RACHEL SHUKERT (born 1980)

      Subterranean Gnomesick Blues; or, the Gnome Who Whet My Fleshy Tent.

      Contributors’ Notes

      Acknowledgments

      Sex contains all, bodies, souls,

      Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results, promulgations,

      Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal mystery, the seminal milk

      All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties,

      delights of the earth,

      All the governments, judges, gods, follow’d persons of the earth,

      These are contain’d in sex as parts of itself and justifications of itself.

      Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness    of his sex,

      Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

      —Walt Whitman,

        from A Woman Waits for Me

      David Lehman was born in New York City in 1948. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999) and The Perfect Murder (Michigan, 2000). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which appeared from Scribner in 2003. He teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City and offers an undergraduate course each fall on Great Poems at NYU. He edited the new edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman has collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull), and with Judith Hall on a pl’em, or play poem, combining words and images, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts). He initiated the Best American Poetry series in 1988 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship a year later. He lives in New York City and in Ithaca, New York.

      INTRODUCTION

      by David Lehman

      In My Secret Life (c. 1890), that classic work of late-Victorian pornography, the author, an anonymous gentleman with a raging libido and the compulsion to repeat and record his amatory adventures, writes, Providence has made the continuation of the species depend on a process of coupling the sexes, called fucking…. It is not a graceful operation—in fact it is not more elegant than pissing, or shitting, and is more ridiculous; but it is one giving the intensest pleasure to the parties operating together, and most people try to do as much of it as they can. The artless simplicity of these sentences is their charm, though they are more complicated than meets the eye. Notice the relation of coupling to the perpetuation of the species on the one hand and to superlative pleasure on the other. The conjugation of the bodies is the observance of a sacrament, a religious imperative, but it also involves the unrelentingly gross human body in an operation no finer than urination or defecation, and more ridiculous.

      Call it fucking or call it making love: The process of coupling is the fact at the center of all erotic speculation. Fucking remains the ultimate profanity. The word’s effect is like that of the tarot card of the lovers dealt upside down: the same meaning in the form of its negative inversion. But any word or phrase for sexual intercourse, euphemistic and genteel, or clinical and precise, or lewd and graphic, will prove inadequate to the ramifications of the act. The many possible ways of talking about it, that great pronoun—or as Freud would have it, id—suggest that contradictory impulses are at work, or contradictory ways of presenting the same impulse. An instance of heterosexual love, for example, can be depicted as the union of yin and yang, husband and wife engaged in the blessed task of procreation, or contrarily, as an anomalous episode during a temporary truce in the battle between the sexes. In any case, we know that sexual desire is a drive that seems to trump all others and dictate human behavior, sometimes against all reason or beyond any rational explanation. We know that it is the most intense and irresistible of bawdy pleasures, that it makes fools and rascals and buffoons of us and often lowers the attitudinal level from tragic postures and epic vistas to bedroom farces and comedies of Eros. Yet as Anonymous noted in 1890, most people try to do as much of it as they can, and everyone thinks about it more than anyone will admit.

      Classical images of Eros—or Cupid, as the Romans renamed him—show an infant archer or, in Jacques-Louis David’s famous painting, an impishly grinning young man with angel wings beside his sleeping beauty, Psyche, embodiment of the eternal feminine. It is not difficult to decode the symbolism. That Cupid is depicted as a baby points to the inevitable consequences of sex, and you are left to wonder whether the child to come is a penalty for a guilty pleasure, an extra mouth to feed, or a reward. According to Apuleius in The Golden Ass, Psyche can link with her lover Cupid only at night and on condition that she not see his face. Given that Psyche means mind or soul in Greek, can the myth be a parable in disguise? Not that use of a blindfold may produce excellent results, but that the soul’s yearning for erotic fulfillment can and does happen, albeit with strings attached that are easy to break, as Psyche learns to her consternation in Apuleius.

      The familiar image of the beast with two backs is ridiculous but accurate and therefore a valuable corrective to high-minded or romantic representations of the theme. A more flattering image comes from George Bernard Shaw. Dancing, in Shaw’s words, is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. (This is just one reason to lament the passing of an era when ballroom dancing was universal.) The subject of sex gives rise to elegant aphorism (Sex is the lyricism of the masses, Charles Baudelaire), extravagantly mixed metaphor (Sex is a black tarantula and sex without religion is like an egg without salt, Luis Buñuel), and exceedingly clever limerick (An Argentine gaucho named Bruno/Declared there is one thing I do know:/A woman is fine,/A boy is divine,/But a llama is numero uno). Sex in The Waste Land is a nightmare from which the typist may never recover, consisting of passionless caresses, unreproved, if undesired, from the young man carbuncular—surely the least desirable epithet ever conferred on a man. But then T. S. Eliot’s poem is an example of what Lee Upton calls dyserotica, which bears the same relation to the erotic as the worldview of 1984 or Brave New World does to Utopia.

      Sex entered literature from the first. Look at Homer. The event propelling The Iliad is a conflict between two warriors over the sexual favors of a concubine, as if the abduction of Helen by Paris—the cause of the entire Trojan War—was pretty much standard practice for that time and place. The hero of The Odyssey, the apotheosis of the Greek masculine ideal, is so magnificent a specimen that goddesses, demigoddesses, and daughters of kings love him, wish to possess him, and do not want to let him go. You can blame Poseidon, god of the sea, for the twenty years it takes Odysseus to reach Ithaka and reclaim his Penelope. But I think the wiles and designs of Calypso and Circe had something to do with it as well.

      English lyric poetry (excluded from this anthology for practical considerations but not for lack of love) got its start with the conventions of courtly love, one prime manifestation of Eros. The greatly undervalued Fulke Greville writes with zest of his darling Cynthia, naked on a bed of play. The seventeenth-century Cavalier poet Robert Herrick has a phrase as sexy as any I have heard about the effect of clothes on the body of the beloved: When as in silks my Julia goes,/Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes/That liquefaction of her clothes. From plainspoken Philip Larkin (1922–1985), who fancied himself less deceived than most, we get a rueful little history lesson: "Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/(Which was rather late for me)—/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP. From the Earl of Rochester’s sharp pen comes a rake’s raunchy oath: O that I now could, by some chemic art,/To sperm convert my vitals and my heart,/That at one thrust I might my soul translate,/And in the womb myself regenerate:/There steep’d in lust, nine months I would remain;/Then boldly fuck my passage out again."

      In the English canon, I have a special affection for the seduction poems of John Donne and Andrew Marvell. Donne issued robust commands and adorned them in the most outlandish of poetic conceits. The female body becomes the map of the world: License my roving hands, and let them go/Before, behind, between, above, below./O my America! my new-found-land. Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is a monument to Latin logic (we’re young, time’s flying, act now) and features the sort of naughty pun that has delighted generations of English majors. Having praised his lady hyperbolically in the poem’s first stanza, Marvell heartlessly threatens her in the next with an image of untimely death: then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity,/And your quaint honor turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust. The pun on quaint—from the medieval queinte, the word from which cunt derives—enhances a poem that epitomizes seventeenth-century metaphysical wit. You’re meant to hear an echo of The Miller’s Tale, the bawdiest of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which a cunning clerk catches a lithesome lass "by the queinte. Chaucer is writing a ribald and bawdy narrative, Marvell a seduction poem with a carpe diem argument. The two works couldn’t differ more dramatically. Yet I would not hesitate to characterize each as erotic—as is, for that matter, the Song of Songs in the Old Testament: Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one bead of thy necklace. How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! And the smell of thine ointments than all spices!"

      In the realm of the erotic, the sacred and the profane converge, and so do the sublime and the ridiculous. The overlapping of sexual and religious impulses in art and literature is too marked to go unnoticed. Take, for example, Donne’s holy sonnet beginning Batter my heart, three-personed God. The poet presents his relation to God as that of a submissive lover begging to be overmastered. He concludes with rapid-fire paradoxes and pleas: Take me to You, imprison me, for I,/Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,/Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me. In some of Emily Dickinson’s poems, as in the Donne sonnet, the sexual imagery serves a religious intent, yet the reader suspects that if you flip the terms sexual and religious in that clause, it would work equally well. The erotically obsessed Graham Greene, a sincere Catholic and unreformed adulterer, has a remarkable novel, The End of the Affair, in which the hero loses his lover not to her

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1