E. E. Cummings’s erotic poems and drawings gathered in a single volume. Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage. from “16” may i feel said he (i’ll squeal said she just once said he) it’s fun said she (may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she

There is a deep tradition of eroticism in American poetry. Thoughtful, provocative, moving, and sometimes mirthful, the poems collected in The Best American Erotic Poems celebrate this exuberant sensuality. These poems range across the varied landscapes of love and sex and desire -- from the intimate parts of the body to the end of an affair, from passion to solitary self-pleasure. With candor and imagination, they capture the delights and torments of sex and sexuality, nudity, love, lust, and the secret life of fantasy. David Lehman, the distinguished editor of the celebrated Best American Poetry series, has culled a witty, titillating, and alluring collection that starts with Francis Scott Key, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Hart Crane, encompasses Frank O'Hara, Anne Sexton, John Updike, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, and Sharon Olds, and concludes with the rising stars of a whole new generation of versifiers, including Sarah Manguso, Ravi Shankar, and Brenda Shaughnessy. In a section of the book that is sure to prompt discussion and further reading, the living poets write about their favorite works of erotic writing. This book will delight, surprise, and inspire.

"Naked Soul: The Erotic Love Poems" is an extraordinary storytelling in the form of erotic love poetry, speaking directly to the reader's heart through sensations that course throughout the body. This powerful collection of erotic and sensual love poems celebrates the erotic spirit in all its forms -- from intense passionate sexual desire to seductive victory. There are love poems for every mood and sentimental feeling, for every phase of love you are experiencing whether you are with a partner or not. Read it slowly. Read a poem at a time, or two-or all at once-but give it time to sink into your heart. Read them again. Visualize. Let the poem show you what may be lying dormant in your own heart. Any poetry lover who loves deep symbolism, storytelling and musing over deep verses will find this book very touching. No matter which phase of love you are growing in currently, this book will serve to sail you further towards the endless ocean of love.

The language of love can be beautiful or bawdy, naively simple or boldly salacious, elegantly baroque or course and common梠r, in certain moments, a wild mixture of all of these. Louis Untermeyer has gathered the world抯 greatest erotica in verse, ranging from the Bible to the present day. The most renowned poets of all time are represented in this fresh collection where freedom of range is matched by an equal freedom of speech in writing about sexual love. From Ovid to Swinburne, from Chaucer to E.E. Cummings, from Queen Elizabeth to Emily Dickinson, the poetry burns with mounting emotion and smolders with importunate pleadings, aggravating delays, passionate fulfillment or, alas, painful frustration. Here are the unexplored extremes encompassed by well-loved poets, the outspoken sensuality in the union of love and lust, and the earthy celebration of carnal pleasure. Here in more than six hundred poems, are the infinite variations in the traditional battle of the sexes: the gallant approach, the tentative flirtation, the provocative badinage, the coy denial, the gradually permitted intimacy, the timid or breathless consent, and the finally shared extremity of passion.

This is a daring collection that will quicken the pulse of all who venture within its covers. With a Thousand Kisses scans the centuries for the creme de la creme of poetic and illustrated eroticism, and the result is a book that will bring many smiles and perhaps a few blushes to its readers. Among the poets in the collection we have included John Donne, Lord Rochester, Browning, Baudelaire, Yeats, Neruda, Ann Sexton and many more. There is even a new and unpublished poem from Louis de Bernieres, novelist and poet, and the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Illustrations come from Boucher, Titian, Correggio, Fragonard, Courbet, Rodin, Toulouse Lautrec... to name but a few.

Longingly sensual poems by award-winning author Giselle Renarde are intertwined with nudes and lovers in this colouring book for adult eyes only.

Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.

A groundbreaking anthology of well-known female poets that broadens traditional notions of erotic poetry.