Scarriet was going to run a Sex Poem March Madness Tournament, but we couldn’t find enough good sex poems.
The ancient Roman poets, many famous for sexual frankness, weren’t much help. To the educated reader, antique expression has its charms, but the Roman sex poems are mostly badly translated, and tend to be vulgar and gossipy.
Quickly scanning the “great poems” (in English) audiences are generally familiar with—and obscure poems published by the “great poets” audiences know and love—Scarriet tournament officials quickly realized that good “death poems” out-number good “sex poems” five hundred to one.
No doubt, with a great deal of time and effort, 64 solid sex poems might be found.
But then we stumbled upon something remarkable and realized we could have our cake and eat it.
Flipping through Richard Aldington’s rather hefty The Viking Book of English Poetry (1941) I noticed something as I perused the first 30 or 40 years of 20th century poetry—poems like Eric Robertson Dobbs’ “When the Ecstatic Body Grips,” Wilfred Owen’s “Greater Love,” Carl Sandburg’s “Cool Tombs,” Edna Millay’s “Oh Sleep Forever In the Latmian Cave,” Alan Seeger’s “I Have A Rendevous With Death,” and Rupert Brooke’s “The Hill.”
We often forget today what a towering cult icon John Keats was to English poetry for most of the 20th century. His Odes, such as the “Nightingale,” (“I have been half in love with easeful death”) self-consciously and gloriously made the poem on death a thing of beauty—such that, within the bounds of good taste, we had something which might almost be called “sex and death poetry.”
Keats: Beauty, Panting Sensuality, and Death.
This formula achieved a universality by which all poems were measured and either advanced it or did not with every poem attempted. It was put to good use by the young poets of the First World War. They weren’t dying from tuberculosis like Keats, but from war.
What I have found, then, is that in poetry, the good transcends topics—and yet there are topics “fitting to the muse” more than others.
When these immutable topics—namely, beauty, sex, and death—are combined with a highly developed sophistication of irony and taste, the result, occasionally, is nothing less than the universal pinnacle of admirable poetry.
One socially awkward and highly sensitive poet—whose poetic talent featured a commingling of a number of qualities, including a fine sense of both horror and sarcasm, did not fight in the Great War, did not suffer from tuberculosis, was scholarly, a student of philosophy at a fine school, understood poetry as a singular, evolving universal, had Poe, Keats, and Shakespeare in his bones, was a Christian, suffered from too much education and thought—this American/English poet destroyed the Keatsian standard with a single, extraordinary poem.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (J. for John Keats, Alfred for Lord Tennyson, Proof and Rock for Christian immortality) achieved effortlessly the profound and melancholy Keatsian formula while introducing a parody which made T.S. Eliot immediately famous and proved the downfall of Keats’ influence in generations to come—the “patient etherized upon a table” mocked, in a single image, the entire industry of death, beauty, and sex poetry, indulged in by English speaking poets everywhere in a stirring, panting, breathing, living achievement of universal good taste.
Keats-besotted poets in the first part of the 20th century got the idea that a sensual, tasteful, poem hinting at sex (or gasping about love) whose main topic was death, couldn’t fail.
For the most part, it couldn’t and it didn’t.
Therefore the collection of wonderful poems on death which will never die.
And now, thanks to a brilliant, cuckolded Harvard philosophy student, who suppressed his “crazy” wife—and because “people want to be free” and because revolutions in taste are inevitable, poetry today is diminished, without standards, and quite lost.
Of course, there are always traditions within the Tradition, as Eliot knew—and The Tradition is always developing in ways that must exclude too much faith in universality and finality. But can I be blamed for feeling certain that Death, Sex, and Beauty will always be poetic tropes of immense importance?
Maybe we couldn’t find enough good sex poems as we perused the historical poetic record, but it seems poems loosely characterized as “death and sex” poems are numerous—and tend to be the best poems ever written.
Successful poems invariably exhibit good taste, since as Edgar Poe described with scientific rigor, art occupies the middle ground in the vast field of human expression between shining truth on one side and sweaty passion on the other.
Taste unites the two extremes: mathematical precision and chaotic passion—poetry is informed by the two opposites on either side of it—poetry/art is life’s sweet spot, the beautiful child of two parents—one mathematical and the other sensuous.
Death unites Poe’s two poles even further, for death has an unsentimental, mathematical, finality on one hand but invokes heightened feelings on the other. It makes perfect sense, then, that the example Poe chose to illustrate his formula was “the death of a beautiful woman.”
Poe emerged out of an already strong tradition: and this will ring a bell with all readers: Death and the Maiden.
Distraught at not finding enough good sex poems, I instead found something far wider and richer: the “death, beauty and sex poem.”
The 2023 March Madness Tournament will feature poems in which death, sex, or death with a hint of sex, is lifted up to the highest standard imaginable. Poetry doesn’t imagine things and other partials, so much as it imagines, when it does its work well, whole tropes growing and changing.
The first sex poem which came to mind when this all started was Shelley’s “Love’s Philosophy.”
The next was Larkin’s “High Windows.”
I also thought of Berryman’s Dream Song #4.
But then as I hefted actual anthologies and began to read, I saw sex poems alone wouldn’t do.
And the rest is (Scarriet poetry) history.
I hope you enjoy the tournament!
The four brackets are Early, International, Romantic and Modern.
We’ve included a few tournament poems below. The tournament itself is a week away.
As you can see by the inclusion of the Philip Sidney poem, iconic warnings against sex do indeed count in this tournament as sex poems.
Also included is the unveiling of a new Ovid translation by Scarriet.
Poor translations of great poems in other languages are always useful and therefore we mustn’t condemn any translation, but I really felt I wanted Ovid’s sex-mad Elegy below to sound like an actual (Latin) poem in English, so Scarriet did Ovid a favor (I hope).
CUPID AND MY CAMPASPE PLAYED -JOHN LYLY
Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses—Cupid paid;
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows,
His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows;
Loses them too; then down he throws
The coral of his lips, the rose
Growing on’s cheeck (but none knows how);
With these, the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin:
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes,
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love! has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?
THOU BLIND MAN’S MARK -SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Thou blind man’s mark, thou fool’s self-chosen snare,
Fond Fancy’s scum and dregs of scattered thought,
Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care,
Thou web of will whose end is never wrought;
Desire! desire, I have too dearly bought
With price of mangled mind thy worthless ware;
Too long, long asleep thou hast me brought,
Who should my mind to higher things prepare.
But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought,
In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire.
For virtue hath this better lesson taught,
Within myself to seek my only hire,
Desiring nought but how to kill desire.
THEY FLEE FROM ME -THOMAS WYATT
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithall sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream: I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also, to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served
I would fain know what she hath deserved.
COOL TOMBS -CARL SANDBURG
When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs,
he forgot the copperheads and the assassin…
in the dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men
and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned
ashes… in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red
haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she
wonder? does she remember? …in the dust, in
the cool tombs?
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and
groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti
and blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers
are losers … tell me if any get more than the
lovers … in the dust … in the cool tombs.
GREATER LOVE -WILFRED OWEN
Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!
Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce love they bear
Cramps them in death’s extreme decrepitude.
Your voice sings not so soft,—
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,—
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear,
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.
Heart, you were never hot
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.
ELEGY IV -OVID translated, Scarriet editors
No, I do not defend my sad lack of morals.
I will not lie that I sometimes am lying.
This I admit—and admit it—why not?—freely.
Generally I’m bad, but let me be specific,
As I curse my faults which give me pleasure.
Pain I will amend, but pleasure I cannot!
My passions are like the pulling river flying,
Heaving me, my inferior rowboat, bouncing.
Do you know there is no lover I do not love? All these
Motives, motives, motives, a hundred motives to love!
Ignoring me, she lowers her eyes shyly
Starting a fire in me, the fire blameworthy,
The same fire which the prostitute sets burning
Luring me onto a couch. All types set me fainting,
Even the old and respectable. It’s not their fault
Nor is it mine—it’s only the fault of the female flame.
Here is a learned one and she too, has me fawning,
Her delightful poetry better than mine. Loving
My verse, this one doesn’t read, believing
Famous poets are worse than I am. She pleases
Me and I am more than willing to please her.
If there is one who attacks my verse, spitting
In my face, “You are no poet!” I’m burning
For this reason to catch her in my her arms. This one walking,
Because of the way she walks, heats my blood. Patient
With all of them, here’s a nerd I will make sexy.
Here is a woman who sings beautifully, wide open
Her mouth to melodious song—and later, for my kisses.
This skillful lyre player has me hot for her fingers,
And what can I do about this one who dances?
The arm movements, the solidity of her poses?
Don’t listen to me; she could turn Hippolytus into Priapus,
The fervently chaste into a man always ready.
You, my tall beauty, almost too long for a modern bed,
And you, sweet and small—just as beautiful!
Tall or short, I love both. This one never puts on finery;
I dress her up in my mind, making her a greater beauty.
This one and her gems have already made me love her.
If they are white or tan with the sun it doesn’t matter.
The black hair of Leda wounds me—and who approaches?
That must be how Aurora looked, hair of gold making
history, the history of beauty teaching me loving
As she comes into view. I love the body, the mind in the body,
Every last beauty they rave about in Rome!
There is no lover in the world I do not love.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Salem MA
3/3/2023