Surprising Quote on Poetry and Eroticism

[KeithD]

Was reading a gardening book (The Wild Braid) today by Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Kunitz (also winner of the National Book Award in Poetry in 1995) and unexpectedly came across this quote:

“So much of the creative life has its source in the erotic. The first impulse is strongly erotic, but then one becomes reflective—a philosophic human being, an explorer—and then as one grows older and older there’s a need to renew that energy associated with the erotic impulse.

“There is always an element of the erotic in a poem about death. In fact I would venture that all one’s feelings about death are a kind of elegy for the erotic, just as all poems about age have that element.

“A poet without a strong libido almost inevitably belongs to the weaker category; such a poet can carry off a technical effect with a degree of flourish, but the poem does not embody the dominant emotive element in the life process. The poem has to be saturated with impulse and that means getting down to the very tissue of experience.”

 

[Winter_Fare]

I first encountered this poem in secondary school, I was 13, and eroticism hadn't reared its head yet as a drive. It is one that has stayed with me since, and I love it. I can't see the eroticism in it. Of human drives, which is primal? In this poem death, fear, disappointment, but definitely not Eros.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori

Wilfred Owen

 

[Winter_Fare]

Also, Summer Somewhere by Danez Smith stays with me, though its author and theme are most certainly well removed from libido. The work is driven by a personal drive to continue to survive and exist outside sex and reproduction.

 

[Winter_Fare]

He was 100 years old! Bless him. I just grabbed the last hardback on Amazon UK for £4 I think it will be a perfect prezzie for my MIL. She loves gardening and poetry.