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 Bunuel), 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 “dysterotica,” which bears the same relation to the erotic as the world-view of 1984 or Brave New World does to Utopia.
Sex enters 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, demi-goddesses, and daughters of kings love him, wish to possess him, and do ot 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) gets 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.”
from The Best American Erotic Poems ed. David Lehman (Scribner, 2008), which includes many marvelous moments, including a poem that a critic alled the worst poem ever written
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