Erotic Poems: A Seductive Selection

by Peter Washington (Editor)

These poems, selected from most of the cultures and histories of world literature, provide magnificent witness to the fact that love is as much an act of the imagination as it is of the body. From fourth-century Li Ch'ung's "Parody of a Lover" to John Betmeman's "Late-Flowering Lust," they re-create, through the revelations of language, that experience of the erotic. Other poets include Theodore Roethke, Robert Graves, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Sylvia Plath, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and many others.

Genres: Poetry, Erotica, Romance, Classics, Anthologies, Adult, Love

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 1994

Reviews

[Haley Bee Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

i actually found some new favorites from this collection! but a pretty hefty chunk of poems just didn’t do it for me. very male centered. the few poems by women in this collection were definitely the best in my opinion!!!

[Navid Hasan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of some very nice poems but there’s hardly anything erotic

[Merel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strangely good collection of poetry. Great foreword by Peter Washington, recognizing that eroticism is about more than sex. A great collection with poetry from all ages and all over the world with proper translations. Definitely recommend the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series to anyone wanting to start reading proper poetry.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Editor has a strange view of erotic--even though he described it in the Intro I'm not sure he followed it--and the sequencing is horrible in spots.

[Bernie Gourley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection stands as one volume in a series entitled “Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets.” Other volumes in the series feature the work of a particular author, a regional or national poetic tradition, a type of poem (e.g. sonnets,) or – like this one – a central theme (e.g. friendship, love, animals, war, etc.)

It’s a broad ranging collection. It covers a period from before Christ (e.g. the Roman poet Catullus) to twentieth century poets such as Sylvia Plath and Joseph Brodsky. The poetry also spans the globe including not only English language poets of Britain and America, but also translated poetry from India, the Middle East, China, Japan, and elsewhere. The poem’s lengths range from the brevity of a Bashō haiku to long poems such as Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” Epically long poems aren’t included, though there are excerpts such as that of Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece.” There is a favoring of classical English forms (e.g. iambic pentameter) even among many translated poems, but that doesn’t mean that the collection lacks diversity of form.

One nice thing about the diversity of poems is that one gets to see how various cultures and time periods dealt with erotic content. It should be noted that readers who are expecting poems that are erotic in the sense of being pornographic or bawdy by today’s standards are likely to be disappointed. That said, while many of the erotic elements are veiled in symbolism, that isn’t the case throughout. There is some explicitly erotic content among the collected poems. (Though, not as explicit as one sees in the works of Allen Ginsberg, for example.) It was interesting to see that it isn’t necessarily that the further back one goes in time the more repressed or veiled the writing is. On the contrary, some of the Latin and old Indian poems were among the most explicit. Of course, decoding the meaning of poets, and the savoring of reading that requires, is part of the joy of reading poetry.

I enjoyed this collection. I thought it was nice gathering of poems that explored sensuality, romance, and eroticism.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite its title, this small book of poems is not so much a book of erotic poems as much as it is an anthology of poems that pertain to—as the author states—the "spirit of Eros."

I appreciate that the breadth of poems covered in the anthology is chronologically vast (this book includes poems from early Greece, East Asia, India, and Arabia) but am terribly disappointed by the repetitive use of certain poets and the overall selection more broadly. Washington clearly has a fascination with certain poets like Robert Graves and Baudelaire. While that's fine, it is annoying to see the same poets take up so much room when there are plenty of other exceptional works from the humanities to choose from. That said, there were some great inclusions that would have been a sin to exclude.

This anthology is repetitive, lackluster, and hurriedly put together.

[Chloe B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Since this is an anthology, I won't review the individual poems. Some I liked, some I didn't, which is the nature of these things.

But the compiling of this work was strange. Some of the things the editor picked were BAFFLING.

Given that this was published nearly 30 years ago (OMG) I can sort of understand the incredibly problematic things classified as "erotic," but there also wasn't nearly enough variety. There were MANY multiples by certain authors when he had so many more to pick from.

And I refuse to believe there were so few women poets writing about eroticism. That's just ludicrous.

[Maggy Eijk · Rating 1 out of 5]

this was not erotic



[also not an inclusive anthology at all]

[Anna Petruk]

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

The jacket blurb is accurate enough, which is to say: collected this way, these are not arousing poems, but instead have in common that they use language to convey the experience of embodied desire or simply to reflect on it. The editor is clear this isn't the same as romantic love, though in fact, as some of the poems convey, the relationship between love and desire is strongly culturally mediated, and for some of the poets (or their translators) is pretty indistinct. One fortunate choice the editor made was to include poems expressing both gay and straight desire. Female poets are underrepresented, and the book was first published in 1994, so it lacks currently-publishing poets.

[Hafidha · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's got some good poems, including many from the days of old (Ovid, Petronius, etc.) and a fair number from the 17th Century and so on. There are gaps. It's old-fashioned, though, in the sense that almost all poems are written by men about women (there are a small number by men about men) and a lot of them are sexist or patronizing, etc. Typical. Still, it's a good collection to have on hand if you like anthologies.

[Petalbooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

A funny little book. :)