12. Driven by sex

All poetry is driven by sex, whether or not it acknowledges the impulse.

(…) Penetration in poetry, as in actual speech, is usually a metaphor.

Versification is as sexual a phenomenon as birdsong; it is typically male display, elaborated more to dishearten and drive off competition by other males than to seduce the oblivious female, whether she be an illiterate human or a foraging hen bird. The male display is sexual but it is not about having or doing sex; it seeks to elaborate a fundamentally banal and momentary interaction by artifice and invention. Once penetration has been achieved, silence falls – for bird and poet.

Poems that enact or depict sexual behaviour seldom have actual sexual congress as their true subject. The golden age of sex poetry in English is the 17th century, when rapacious paraphilias and perversities were made to stand for creeping absolutism and its discontents. All kinds of disgusting behaviours were attributed to courtiers, peers, politicians and monarchs, and described in often puke-making detail. / Germaine Greer, New Statesman

So in einer sehr kritischen Besprechung der Anthologie 

The Poetry of Sex
Edited by Sophie Hannah
Viking, 220pp, £14.99