by David Lehman
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 husband but to a much more formidable adversary—the divinity whom she worships devoutly in church. It’s as if to say that Augustine (as he implies in his Confessions ) could as easily have been a sinner as a saint, and with equal passion. For sex is as ancient a ritual, as formidable an imperative, and as elemental an instinct as the impulses to worship and to pray.
Nin Andrews remembers the first time she heard of Eros. Nin was in first grade, and her mother would read aloud to her at night, alternating Bible stories and Greek myths. “One night Mom read of Hades kidnapping Persephone,” she recalls. “Another night King David saw Bathsheba bathing. ‘Why are these men so bad?’ I asked. My mother’s answer: ‘It’s when they’re bad that the story is good, isn’t it?’” Yes, bad behavior is almost always more erotic than good. “Christianity,” according to the French novelist Anatole France, “has done a great deal for love by making a sin out of it.” The transgressive nature of much sexual behavior acts more often as an inducement than as a deterrent, and though some very good poems about lawful wedded bliss do get written, an atmosphere of sinfulness and secrecy, of clandestine assignations and furtive infidelities, permeates much of the best erotic writing. In Greene’s novels, for example, espionage is either an excuse for sexual adventure or a metaphor for it, danger fused with thrill. The id is a rebel angel. Though God instructs Adam to “be fruitful and multiply”—it is the first commandment in Genesis—the sexual means to this end are associated with disobedience. The act of linking their bodies is what Adam and Eve do to consummate their original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge, and c arnal knowledge is a beautiful euphemism for copulation considered as a way of passing forbidden knowledge between bodies. And after Adam and Eve have sex and sleep it off, they wake to the consciousness of guilt and the end of public nudity.
The nature of
desire, that force or drive that overpowers the will, blinds the eyes, and clouds the rational mind, is a subject in many poems of Eros. Strict constructionists of the erotic argue for the centrality of longing and desire. They feel instinctively that for a poem to qualify as erotic, it has to lead to arousal or quicken desire. I favor a more elastic definition. There is room here for love and wanton lust; for the imp of the perverse, all forms of ardor, all manner of fetish; for rhapsodies of wild nights and rapturous dawns. But I grant the larger point: The heart of the erotic lies not in fulfillment but in desire. As Barbara Lazear Ascher puts it in her book Dancing in the Dark (1999), the erotic heat is “in the longing not the humping.” Desire : It is a peculiarity of the word that it rhymes with fire (as in Robert Frost’s end-of-the-world poem “Fire and Ice”) and with a synonym for need. Let William Blake demonstrate in his four-line poem “The Question Answered”: “What is it men in women do require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire./What is it women in men do require?/The lineaments of Gratified Desire.”
The idea for this book springs from twin observations about American poetry. Even before launching an annual anthology monitoring the contemporary scene, I couldn’t help noticing that poets, especially younger poets, and younger women above all, were writing with unusual candor and passion and often with intelligence and wit about their sexual relationships. It was all fair game, the whole erotic circle leading from initial attraction to bittersweet after-the-fact rumination and back, with plenty of stops along the way for insults, quarrels, kisses, morals, seduction, foreplay, coition, orgasm, and postcoital tristesse. The tendency has grown even bolder in the last twenty years. Poets are examining the erotic life from all angles and every point of view. They are writing poems based on autobiographical episodes and flamboyant fantasies, poems about body parts and about the very vocabulary we use for our sexual organs, and they are using all the devices at their disposal. They are writing sonnets and sestinas, pantoums and prose poems, ballads and blues. In these pages you will encounter all of the above plus a villanelle, an epigram, an ode to semen, more than one meditation on masturbation, an aubade to greet the dawn and a “late” aubade to justify staying in bed, letters from lover to lover, a dream of universal nudity, and a dream song to infiltrate the sleeping mind in much the way that Cupid joined Pysche in the deepest dark of the night.
The second observation from which this book springs is the recognition that there exists a vital American tradition of erotic poetry. I am thinking of Walt Whitman celebrating the human body and Emily Dickinson contemplating the nectars of Eden, of Edgar Allan Poe’s obsession with another man’s bride and Edith Wharton’s postscript to a night of abandon, of Emma Lazarus’s dream of a secret kiss and Gertrude Stein’s hymn to “lifting belly.” As I read for this book, works of superb sensuality surfaced from sources expected (E. E. Cummings) and unlikely if known at all (Isabella Stewart Gardner). A poem by Francis Scott Key in appreciation of a nubile young woman espied in the nudity of her “shower bath” came as a big surprise. Nor had I previously encountered the suite of short poems written by the aging Kenneth Rexroth in the voice of a young Japanese woman. Among my favorite works in The Best American Erotic Poems is one that Hart Crane wrote at the age of twenty about a man bandaging the hand of a man injured in a factory accident. The subject of “Episode of Hands” is medical. But in its language and imagery, it is extraordinarily erotic: “The gash was bleeding, and a shaft of sun/That glittered in and out among the wheels,/Fell lightly, warmly, down into the wound.” I agree with Ron Horning’s assessment: “‘Episode of Hands’ is as close to Cavafy as any American has ever gotten.”
W. H. Auden’s “The Platonic Blow” is a camp classic, an over-the-top ballad portraying the ideal blowjob. Auden wrote it in New York in 1948 and relished its composition, but he later disavowed it and never claimed copyright. With its flourishes of rhyme and rhetoric, the poem survived for a long time on its underground circulation. But the impulse to censor or self-censor is much less strong today than when Auden began his poem with the smell of the locker room on a spring day, making it “a day for a lay” or “a day to blow or get blown.” I didn’t think twice about including “The Platonic Blow,” which is so well crafted that it blurs any line you can draw between erotica and pornography. The case against Robert Frost’s “The Subverted Flower” is that the scenario described therein will not quicken your libido or warm your heart. But I contend that sexual failure, as common as it is unfortunate, has its place in the literature of Eros. And this dark and uncanny poem begs to be read, interpreted, and discussed in the context of the erotic.
Readers of pornography on the judicial bench claim that they can’t define it but know it when they see it. That is as good an approach as any and has the virtue of implying that all the verbiage on the subject has left us little wiser. You can safely say that pornography “appeals to the prurient interest,” whereas erotica has “literary or artistic value.” The key word in that formulation is “value,” and certainly, in the making of this book, I wanted poems that have added value to our lives and our culture. As I always do when working on an anthology, I welcomed suggestions from friends, colleagues, and students, and what amazed me was how little agreement there was. The disputes were less about the literary quality of the work in review than about whether it was sufficiently erotic. One person recommended Robert Lowell’s “Man and Wife,” in which the married couple has taken tranquilizers, the woman is asleep with her back to the man, and there is a heavy sadness in the air that I took as the very antithesis of the erotic. I know that readers will approach the contents of this book with its title in mind and that therefore poems of a certain subtlety or covert sexual agenda will fit nicely. But I also know that no definition will come in handy to justify my decision to include Frost’s “Subverted Flower” and not Lowell’s “Man and Wife.” It is finally a matter of judgment, instinct, and nerve, and the editor has no choice but to trust his own responses to the serious contenders. Every poem in this book has given me pleasure, most of them have taught me something, and the general assembly delights me with its variety and energy.
Following William Gass in On Being Blue (1976), I believe there are multiple ways that sex can enter a work of writing, including “direct depiction,” the use of “sexual words,” “displacement” (the use of metaphor), and “the use of language like a lover.” I wanted examples of all these. Gass’s idea that the act of writing can itself be erotic makes a lot of sense to me. There are poems that display, in his words, “not the language of love, but the love of language, not matter, but meaning, not what the tongue touches, but what it forms, not lips and nipples, but nouns and verbs.” I am partial to wit in poetry and was intent on including comic and satiric poems in a variety of registers, but I was also deeply attracted to poems that had the sort of hot-blooded passion that you find superbly in D. H. Lawrence. “Be still when you have nothing to say,” Lawrence wrote. “When genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”
Over a hundred years after Freud and his disciples argued for the centrality of sex in the formation of the human personality, what was once a contention has become an axiom. Hormones reign and sex sells. If anything, the amount of sex in our cultural life has grown. Nudity onstage in theatrical productions of Marat/Sade and Oh! Calcutta! was sensational in the 1960s but is no big deal today. We are, says the New Republic columnist Britt Peterson, “awash in raunch culture.” She tells of “alt-porn, a new hipster genre” of movie, in which “the smut itself is becoming more upper-middle-class: urbane, ironic, self-aware, and intellectually as well as sexually titillating.” 1 Eve Fairbanks, another New Republic diarist, is okay with the knowledge that if you Google her name, you get links to “rambling, bawdy paragraphs done in a stream-of-consciousness, misspelled, arbitrarily capitalized style, like a dirty parody of Finnegans Wake.” The Internet has lifted veils, opened closets, and made a host of fetishes and perversities seem not exactly norm
al or routine but ubiquitous and therefore legitimate. If every individual can aspire to his or her own website, the value has to be on disclosure, not reticence. “Teens blog details, true or made up, about their personal lives that their elders would have blushed to put in their diaries.” 2 Women’s erotica has taken off as a publishing category somewhere between mass romance and outright porn. Sample titles: Bound, Big Guns out of Uniform, and Gotta Have It. 3 In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan reports on the “teenage oral-sex craze” and wonders how it came about that America’s girls are “on their knees.” All over Chicago, where Flanagan lives, “in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the leafiest neighborhoods, twelve-and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral sex on as many boys as they can.” 4 Flanagan is appalled at the phenomenon. Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair is breezy in contrast as he propounds the view that the blowjob is America’s “signature sex act.” Hitchens talks about Deep Throat, Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita, and The Godfather, not to mention the fabled Oval Office vestibule in the Clinton White House, in pursuit of his story: “how America grabbed the Olympic scepter of the blowjob and held on tight.” 5
