“The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire erotic spectrum, a great chain of being rising from matter to spirit, from the coarsest lust to chastity and romantic idealism. The poem’s themes of sex and politics are parallel: the psyche, like society, must be disciplined by good government. Spenser agrees with the classical and Christian philosophers on the primacy of reason over animal appetites. He looks forward to the Romantic poets, however, in the way that he shows the sex impulse as ultimately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays.”

— Camille Paglia

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 188

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The Faerie Queene is the most extended and extensive meditation on sex in the history of poetry. It charts the entire e…" by Camille Paglia?

Camille Paglia 326

American writer 1947

Related quotes

“It is generally agreed that Spinoza fell into nominalism. But he did in any case take measures to protect himself from idealism, both in developing his theory of a substance with infinite attributes, and in arguing for the parallelism of the two attributes extension and thought.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), "Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?"
A - F, Louis Althusser

“[Replying to the question of the presenter: "where did the name "Sex Pistols" come from, who thought this name up?"] Some animal. I can't remember. It doesn't matter. It's history.”

John Lydon (1956) English singer, songwriter, and musician

The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder (27th June 1980)

“The human spirit sublimates
the impulses it thwarts;
a healthy sex life mitigates
the lust for other sports.”

Piet Hein (1905–1996) Danish puzzle designer, mathematician, author, poet

Hint And Suggestion : Admonitory grook addressed to youth
Grooks

“Sex is not part of a relationship, but is, to the contrary, a solitary experience as well as being non-creative and a gross waste of time. The female can easily - far more easily than she may think - condition her sex drive away, leaving her completely cool and cerebral and free to pursue truly worthy relationships and activities; but the male, who seems to dig women sexually and who seeks constantly to arouse them, stimulates the highly-sexed female to frenzies of lust, throwing her into a sex bag from which few women ever escape. The lecherous male excites the lustful female; he has to - when the female transcends her body, rises above animalism, the male, whose ego consists of his cock, will disappear.”

Valerie Solanas book SCUM Manifesto

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 12 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original; line break across "highly-"/"sexed").

“Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:

"Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please"

This also became Conrad's epitaph.”

Joseph Conrad book The Rover

Source: The Rover

“To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime. There's sex for self-improvement start to finish and there's sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life- how shall I put it?- differs fundamentally from the sex life of a whale. We are not whales- and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex lives.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel (1982), Chapter 4: The Whale's Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations

“Sex is about the connection. Great sex is a by-product, for me, of a great relationship, where you have communication and it's an extension of that. Where it's just free. And that's how it should be. It's spectacular.”

Tom Cruise (1962) American actor and film producer

Quoted in Nicole Lampert, "Cruise: Katie can use painkillers during birth" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=383118&in_page_id=1773, The Daily Mail (2006-04-15).

“We had great sex, but we argued politics. […] Now we enjoy politics and argue sex.”

Harvey Fierstein (1954) actor from the United States

This Is Not Going to Be Pretty, Live at the Bottom Line (1995), Safe Sex

“Poetry is the most bodliy of arts, the medium of poetry is the column of breath rising from the diaphragm in the individual's chest to be shaped into meaning sounds inside the mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.”

Robert Pinsky (1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.

The Art of Poetry - interview 1995 with Downing & Kunitz

“Emily Dickinson is the female Sade, and her poems are the prison dreams of a self-incarcerated, sadomasochistic imaginist. When she is rescued from American Studies departments and juxtaposed with Dante and Baudelaire, her barbarities and diabolical acts of will become glaringly apparent. Dickinson inherits through Blake the rape cycle of The Faerie Queene. Blake and Spenser are her allies in helping pagan Coleridge defeat Protestant Wordsworth.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 624

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Camille Paglia 326

Related quotes

Related topics