While Brunetto--and also Diotima--seek a purely spiritual eroticism, Christianity calls man to
erotic love and creativity with the entirety of his being.
Some, such as caring, respect, mutual enjoyment, and
erotic love, are relatively straightforward.
Since there is no separation of the soul and body in Wolfe's perception of
erotic love, profanation of the body also entangles the profanation of the soul.
A new book from Dog Ear Publishing by authors Ron and Patti Marinari studies the
erotic love mentioned in that ancient poem and applies it to modern-day marriages.
So Kierkegaard, having dismissed
erotic love once, returns to it in rather more charitable (if possibly pitying) terms:
Romeo rejects the shallow, unsatisfying life offered by Veronese politics in favor of the life of
erotic love. And Romeo's contempt for the world as he sees it only makes his turn to
erotic love all the more extreme.
In her long and thoughtful introduction, Rupp forestalls some possible misgivings about what she describes as the "audacious undertaking" of traversing millennia and cultures to collect a wide range of examples of
erotic love and sex between women (2).
'The Base of All Metaphysics' does not sublimate, dilute, or silence Whitman's celebration of
erotic love between men as many have argued." I was left wondering, though, whether it is actually this combination of dilution, radicalism, sublimation, and secrecy that makes "Calamus" so titillating and compelling in the first place.
Notable features of this unfairly modest selection are devotional poetry and
erotic love poetry.
But
erotic love, the love that drives us to seek another to enrich our life, does not grow as it is scattered.
erotic love, politics, loss) bring with them a vocabulary that includes religious terms, even when the subject matter is not first and foremost spiritual.
"They go from one extreme to another, from sentimental love to platonic, abstract love, to
erotic love or sex," he said.