INTRODUCTION

I have always liked poems that abused women. In simple generational terms, this should not be particularly surprising. Anyone whose early reading habits were influenced by T.S. Eliot would encounter a fearsome array of intensely sexualised verse, Donne, Marvell, Blake, Baudelaire, Swinburne, along with a whole bevy of Jacobean dramatists, whose common feature may in retrospect be seen as a kind of eroticised apprehension. It may seem a straightforward enough decision to reject these early loyalties as a regrettable aberration. Yet responses more complex and persistent than an adolescent craving for shock and arousal must also be involved; this intimacy of sensation is also collective, intelligible, and endorsed.