This is My Beloved

by Walter Benton

Born in Austria of Russian parents, Walter Benton lived most of his life in the United States. After working on a farm, in a steel mill, as a window washer, as a salesman, and at various other jobs, he entered Ohio University in 1931, and in due course was graduated. He then spent five years as a social investigator in New York. During the second World War he served in the United States Army, being commissioned a lieutenant of the Signal Corps in the autumn of 1942 and later being promoted to a captaincy. After the war he returned to New York and devoted his time to writing.

This Is My Beloved, the remarkable diary in verse that has become one of the most popular books of poetry, was his first published volume, though his work was already familiar to readers of Poetry, Fantasy, the Yale Review, and the New Republic. Never a Greater Need, a second selection of his poems, was issued in 1948. Walter Benton died in 1976.

Genres: Poetry, Romance, Classics, Nonfiction

43 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1943

About the author

Walter Potashnik Benton was an American poet and writer. Benton was born to Russian immigrant parents living in Austria.

His two books of poetry are his best-known works. This Is My Beloved was published in 1943 and has become one of the best-selling books of poetry. This volume was followed by another book of love poems, entitled Never a Greater Need, that was published in 1948.

[Wikipedia]

Reviews

[Elnora Fortson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read Walter Benton's "This Is My Beloved" over 25 years ago. I now own a new copy as well as his book dramatically read to music by Arthur Prysock. This book is for all romantics and a good read.

[Aberjhani · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Perfect Antidote for Wartime Blues

Critics were divided over whether THIS IS MY BELOVED, by Walter Benton, was pornography or literary art when it first came out. That question really should have been answered by these lines from the very first poem in the book: "Because hate is legislated...written into/ the primer and the testament,/ shot into our blood and brain like vaccine or vitamins...I need love more than ever now..."

There's no doubt that Benton, who was born in Austria and lived later in the United States, was writing as an individual. However, considering that World War II was approaching its bloodiest worse when the book was first published in 1943, it's quite likely he was also speaking metaphorically on behalf of all humanity. Has anyone yet discovered a better antidote for the disease of international war than universal love?

Similarly, the great jazz and pop singer Arthur Prysock recorded what is now a classic spoken word version of the book (please see related CD review at Creative Thinkers International) in December 1968 when the Vietnam War had the world in tears. Small wonder, then, that a new generation marked indelibly by the Iraq War in 2007 is claiming both the book and CD version of "This Is My Beloved" for its own. In times like these, so much of what it has to say is exactly what we need to hear.

By Author-Poet Aberjhani
Author of I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
And Founder of Creative Thinkers International

[Jeff Urbanek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benton's words are fire to the soul. How do you read this dispassionately?

[Michael Lindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to be perfectly honest in this review: I know nothing about the identity of Walter Benton, Lillian, or the nature of their relationship other than what is depicted in this brief work, nor do I wish to seek out any more information. I cannot even say with confidence that this is a work of non-fiction. What I can say is that the poems recorded in "This Is My Beloved" slowly weave together a story that is only half-told, one that mixes love with loss and desire with despair. Though the entries made by the speaker span several months, the length that this relationship lasted is unknown and it cannot even be assured that the august entry was the same year as the one in June.

Originally I only gave this book two stars, although going through it again, I decided that there were enough good poems that it deserves three. The structure of the book didn't bother me at all; I found this little story of love poems to be quite entertaining. The only problems I really had with "This Is My Beloved" was the poems themselves. To be brutally honest, some of them just didn't meet my tastes; I felt that they were too tacky. But what really bothered me about the poems started popping up in section two, and I'm going to risk sounding like a Philistine just to get it out there: the guy would not shut up about her body. I mean I get that they're love poems and he's embracing the beauty of the human body and whatnot, but REALLY? Is it really that impossible to go more than two poems without somehow mentioning her hips, thighs, or breasts? Is it truly that hard to describe ANY landscape without comparing it to either a stripper or some woman's body part? I mean, after reading all of Benton's love poems, all I really know is that he thought that Lillian had a very attractive body, and that he enjoyed making love with her. He could have written ONE poem about it, I don't see the need for fifteen. The only reason I'm so aggravated about this is that be continuously bringing up unnecessary attention to his lover's body, the experience of reading "This Is My Beloved" went from observing a story of tender love to walking in on a couple having sex, and then not being allowed to leave until they finished.

[Chip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I set this slender tome aside from my mothers library after she died in '06. I had opened it and read an entry at random (it is written in diary/journal format). Benton mentions the Hocking River and hitch hiking to Marietta- which places him at or near the University of Ohio, in Athens (I would like to know), from which I graduated, and where I had such formative counter-culture college life experiences in the early '70's (though published in '43, he does mention hashish and "reefer"!). Thus, I was drawn and intriuged, not only by this connectionof local, but by the passionate, sensual descriptive testimony of love being expressed. I brought the book home and have just, finally, read it. I began, again, by reading random entries. It may have been the entry about his needing to continually re-forget his lover as every season reminds him of her that luanched me into sobbing like I haven't since my own last loss of love, and much longer before that, obviously, some sleeping sense of loss in my own life was triggered by his way of expressing his still-new despair of separation.
I proceeded set down to read from begiinning to end. Such unmitigated, adoration and infatuation with "Lillian". There was a lot of love making going on that spring and summer and he delights in describing her body with a most endearing and creative sensuality. At the same time, reading from start to finish, some of the infatuated observations and wordings are repeaated and can diminish some of the initial impacts;some are a bit cliche. However, I allow for this as the diary of a (young?) man so in love; he just can't help but be continuously, newly enthralled with the lovely woman-creature in his life. I would say that randomly selecting entries might be the best way to read this, but there is a progression eventually as the lovers fall apart. A last personal connection: the last entry is my birthday. The internet is thin on references to Walter Benton(not the jazz saxophonist). I would like to know more about him.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of poetry, ever. Very controversial at the time it was written.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is my beloved
And this is my friend.” ~Song of Solomon 5:16

I suppose I should have realized, based on the title, that this poetry book would be laden with sexual descriptions but, after reading the first poem, which didn’t contain any, my brain didn’t make the connection. I realized soon enough that there is a strong Song of Solomon influence within these lyrical but explicit descriptions.

In part, I feel tempted to make one of those jokes about male authors writing women characters because the focal point here was every aspect of his lover’s body, however, there were lines about who she was covertly tucked between the rest. And because of the clear influence, his choices in those vivid descriptions do make sense to me.

The timeline gives the sense of sensual love suddenly lost, followed by deep grief and longing that hints at obsession, although Benton eventually reveals the years spent with his lover, and this makes it easier to understand the months spent pining away for her.

Had I known what the content would be like ahead of time, I might not have chosen this for myself, but I suppose we can chalk this up to a happy accident. I found the poetry impressive, the sequence of events well-defined through verse, and the emotion of it all powerfully conveyed.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another randomly selected book of poetry, an activity that doesn't always pay dividends, but this time it did.

This is the second book of poetry I've read this year with overt sexual content, the other being Kate Tempest's Running Upon the Wires: Poems. I wasn't so keen on Tempest's collection (the first of hers I've read and didn't immediately take to), but Benton's sexual reference seem softer, more tender and poetic, even when they are not hidden behind poetical allusion, which they often are. Luckily, I didn't read the back cover blurb, which bears a review by Louis Untermeyer saying, "The imagery is senuous and exact, but no more graphic - or pornographic - than the images in the Song of Solomon", as the denial of pornographic content would have led me to suspect more explicit content than it actually contains and I'd have returned it to the shelf - the curse of reverse-psychology and contrianism! So, yes, sexual/sensual content; no, pornographic/prurient content.

The poems bring us into a the middle of a passionate relationship, revealed through meditations upon the lover's body using images of nature, the changing seasons and cityscapes, then through break-up and a wistful longing after the lover has gone and another (less satisfying?) partnership entered into.

I'd not heard of Benton before spotting this volume, though his Wikipedia entry says that This Is My Beloved was influential in its time, with several adaptations of it being set to music between the end of the 1940s and the late 1960s.

Not necessarily what I'd have picked for myself, which is why my ongoing experiment in poetical serendipty is worthwhile.

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

SHOCKING 1940s PORNOGRAPHY!!! I mean look at this:

We need so little room, we two . . . thus on a single pillow--
as we move nearer,
nearer heaven--until I burst inside you like a screaming rocket.

Then we are quietly apart . . . returning to this earth.

I am not a fan of sentimental love poetry, but I guess if you have to read it, why not try Benton's book.

[Walter Pritchett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it a strange coincident or is it possible that this book by Walter Benton is the same of "The Songs of Solomon" from the Old Testament? I found too many obvious parallels. With all the reviews and critiques I'm amazed no one as drawn the same conclusion. Maybe everyone is thrown off by some of the graphic language. Of course The Songs of Solomon was very graphic in is day. What do U think?

[Deborah Wineinger McGregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book of poetry which I don't normally read. However, I bought a 1945 edition at an estate sale. I sat down to "flip through" it and discovered it was a diary written in verse. A little difficult reading at first - haven't read much poetry (especially not a whole book) since college days. Enjoyed reading it during the recent cold spell, wrapped in a comfy blanket.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erotic love poetry that doesn't border on the lewd or the silly. An idealized love, love comes in the first part, in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th love has left, without drama, without fights, without the ugliness. A veil is drawn straight to reminiscence, the chance encounter, and the longing.

Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

[Mark Carey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully haunting and hauntingly beautiful, the verse in this collection could only have flowed from an epically open heart. Benton's sensual description is as tender as his heartbreak is real. Almost too rending to read.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

best first page poem ever, four and a half stars

[Carolina Tapia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's love in its truest raw form. I read it when I met my first love and I read it now 6 years later and having learned a lot in life and love. It's bittersweet personally and literarily .

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

lovely. not all the time startling in their originality, but beautiful love poems always.

[The Book Junkie Reads . . . · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful book with love on each page. Very happy that I took the time to track this book down.

[Marina Aris · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're unfortunate enough to experience unrequited love, this book is your heart's anthem. Beautiful, moving and heartbreaking all at once.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

ENTRY October 15 [NORTHFIELD, VERMONT]

Everyone is sleeping. Nothing wakes. The woods
are motionless. The wind is down to a whisper.
Sleep hums like current — yes, audibly — through the bright steel night.

The evening star rises Uke a flaming wick.
Hills fit into hills Uke lovers, their great dark straddling thighs
clasping still greater darkness where they meet. A star breaks,
arcs down the night — like God striking a match across the cathedral ceiling.

Therefore I wish: see my lips move — making your name. It is so still, so still.
I am sure that you must hear me —


My essay for the Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...

Tucked on a side street in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood is Foyer, a small store specializing in plants, stationery, and “treasures.” On a bleak January day I stopped in for a couple of tillandsia and succulents to liven up the afternoon and stumbled on a slim collection of poetry. Apparently displayed because its malachite-colored cover harmonized with the nearby aloes and fiddle-leaf figs, the book’s spine declared it This Is My Beloved by W. Benton.

Flipping through, I was struck by how alternately arresting yet silly the verses were. Opening at random to “Entry August 27,” I read: “The white full moon like a great beautiful whore / solicits over the city, eggs the lovers on—.” Then a little later, “Entry September 17”: “See, I alter nothing. This is you and I in dark-gray lead, / on plain white paper. No flattering / magenta colors. No accompaniment in minor key—or brilliant arpeggios.” Later still, “Entry September 27”: “How dark is the river! How still … and dark / with deep, slow moving darkness! / the seagulls, dreaming violence, cried me awake with their strangely anguished / voices—like the voices of women being taken in love.” Was this good poetry? Did it matter? Benton’s lush imagery, coupled with his over-the-top excess, made it impossible to look away. Here was a writer going for broke on every page in a way that felt goofy but winsome. I scooped up the book for five bucks.

Researching back home, I discovered that Benton was born in 1904 in a region of what is now Ukraine known as Polish Galicia, and relocated to the United States with his mother and siblings in 1921. He was kind of a proto-Rod McKuen. In fact, McKuen—a singer-songwriter and one of the bestselling poets of the 1960s—credited Benton as an inspiration, and acknowledged that his “more romantic poetry” was influenced by Benton’s two books. “Until I came to Random House,” McKuen said, “Benton held the record for selling the most books of poetry at that venerable publishing establishment.”

Like McKuen, Benton released several albums of poetry, beginning with Atlantic Records’ 1949 rendition of This Is My Beloved, narrated by actor John Dall and backed by a 28-piece orchestra and a 16-voice chorus. In 1956, actor Alfred Ryder and composer Vernon Duke issued another recorded take on the book. A few years later, in 1962, louche movie star Laurence Harvey released his own lounge lizard interpretation, accompanied by jazz musician Herbie Mann. Finally, in 1968, Arthur Prysock—whose baritone “projected a calm, reassuring virility,” according to the New York Times—put out a version in which he read excerpts from This Is My Beloved over an instrumental jazz backdrop.

Benton was massively popular in his heyday. This Is My Beloved came out in 1943; Billboard reported in early 1949 that the book had sold more than 350,000 copies, and it remained continuously in print for decades. Benton’s work appeared in the Yale Review, Esquire, the New Republic, Poetry, and other prestigious outlets, but he’s best remembered today (if at all) for his World War II poetry. The only contemporary review of This Is My Beloved I could track down was in Kirkus Reviews in 1942. It’s a wry, saucy write-up that reads: “High voltage verse, this, in free verse for a sequence of lyrics commemorating a love affair and its termination. Intimate corporeal and physical detail and extravagant praise thereof, in what might mildly be termed erotica. D.H. Lawrence—move over.”

Whatever critics’ ambivalence, Benton wrote one of the bestselling poetry collections in America. Why had I never heard of him? Exposure doesn’t equal merit, of course, but these poems had resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers over the years and now struck a chord in me. I wanted to understand why.

***

I started with an exhaustive search through the library at DePaul University, where I teach—a search that included several historical indices and every poetry reference book the research librarian could find. I came up with zero leads about Benton. From the few biographical sources online, I learned that he worked mostly manual jobs—on a farm, at a steel mill, as a window washer—to put himself through college at Ohio University during the Great Depression. After college he moved to New York City and worked as a social investigator. During World War II, he was a lieutenant and then a captain in the Signal Corps. When he returned to New York, he “devoted his time to writing,” according to his publisher. But he published only one other collection, Never a Greater Need (1948), which includes some of his war poetry, before suffering a massive stroke in 1965. He died in 1976. That’s all I could find out about one of America’s most successful poets.

But Benton’s work told a deeper story. Whether classified as a series of poems or a single long poem divided into sections, This Is My Beloved chronicles a steamy love affair and its unwelcome conclusion. The volume is dedicated to “Lillian,” and each line addresses her. All of the poems are titled “Entry” and each is followed by a date, giving the pieces a diaristic quality with all the intimacy and revelation one would expect. Devouring the book at my dining room table that icy January morning put me in mind of a tradition going back to Ovid and his imaginary Corinna, or the Bible’s Song of Solomon, with its unexpectedly candid treatment of desire. After I finished reading, I discovered a blurb by famed author and anthologist Louis Untermeyer that expressed similar sentiments: “I certainly do not find these poems pornographic. They are direct and free, quick with life and warm with remembered passion. The imagery is sensuous and exact, but no more graphic—or pornographic—than the images in the Song of Songs. It is remarkable how Benton has varied the erotic theme and the overtones of physical love.” (Untermeyer later included Benton in his Uninhibited Treasury of Erotic Poetry, published by Dial Press in 1963.)

Untermeyer certifies Benton’s eroticism as aesthetically legitimate if nonetheless forbidden. In his essay “A Yeti in the District,” the poet Donald Hall observes that in every generation “there is one poet whom high school boys read to high school girls in order to get into their pants. In my day, it was Walter Benton, whose This Is My Beloved was endorsed by the anthologist Louis Untermeyer in publishers’ ads (‘I certainly do not find these poems pornographic’), which swept a teenage mob into bookstores.”

The implicit disreputability of Untermeyer’s endorsement is spot-on because Benton’s poems are risqué but decidedly not porn. It’s unlikely that anybody masturbates to Benton’s verse. Rather, it seems designed to be, as Hall puts it, an accoutrement to enjoy with someone else—a Valentine, a tool for seduction. It’s mood music and low lights. It’s incense, wine, and candles. But it’s not just that. This Is My Beloved also reminds me of the 17th century Cavalier poetry of Robert Herrick, with Benton’s “Lillian” being the equivalent of Herrick’s “Julia.” It also recalls the frank carnality of Walt Whitman: big-voiced, full-throated, and unashamed. There are shades of the authoritative-in-love voice of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Benton’s explicit catalogue of physical pleasures, but without any cynicism or self-restraint. There’s even something Shakespearean in the sense that, as in the Bard’s sonnets, Benton’s poems are about both his beloved and his rhetorical skill in expressing that love.

In “Entry May 11,” for instance, he writes that “Some see you in similes,” whereas he sees “you best unrelated … with not a metaphor to your name: / your hair not like the silk of corn or spiders but like your hair, / your mouth resembling nothing so wonderfully much as your own mouth.” In other words, he understands Lillian’s beauty as best left unadorned, because “compliments become you / as tinsel becomes a tall snow covered cedar in a mountain cedar wood.”

At times, Benton’s passion is sophisticated and at other times bafflingly naïve, as in “Entry November 15”:

I learned your hair many ways … by the musk and visually,
by the Braille touch. I could tell which part of your body grew
it:
the underhair fringing your face was sensitive like thin smoke
in a draught,
between your thighs it was natural and crisp like the hearts of
lettuce.

Conflating pubic hair with salad raises the prospect that it might be impossible to write erotically without also writing comically, whether that comedy is intentional or not.

Benton’s forthright sensuality appealed to the readers of his age, and the book was eagerly bought and consumed, albeit not much written about. The mid-20th century was a more buttoned-up era, and a reputable newspaper likely would not have reviewed Benton. Thus, his stratospheric sales figures seem attributable to grassroots fandom and enthusiastic word of mouth. I figured this explained why I came up dry in finding further details about Benton himself.

All other resources leading to dead ends, I signed up for a 14-day free trial on a genealogy site just to reach one of Benton’s distant relatives who posted on that service’s message boards. While waiting for his reply, I read and re-read This Is My Beloved, trying to put my finger on what mesmerized me about the poems, why Benton held me rapt.

The poet William Rose Benét offers some insight. Benét, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dust Which Is God (1941), also edited the Saturday Review of Literature, which published several Benton poems. Of This Is My Beloved, Benét declared:

Never before has the delight and wonder experienced in young love, in which is implicit physical discovery, been conveyed with such touching honesty or with rhapsody so involving unconscious pathos. Those who seek to drag any honest writing through the gutters of their own minds will do the same with this. Those who are not afraid of the strange miracle of life will understand this brave verse.

A commendation, yes, but one with a caveat built-in, for the pathos in Benton frequently is, for better or worse, un-self-aware, and the strange miracle of life as he presents it is also accidentally funny.

Benton’s poems come across as ostentatious, extravagant, and perhaps a little insane, a spectacle in questionable taste, like proposing on the JumboTron at a sports game or raining a billion rose petals on your beloved from a helicopter. His aptitude for devotion is almost self-parodic and certainly breathless, much like a Douglas Sirk melodrama. His speaker will do anything for his lady and he doesn’t care who knows it. Take “Entry November 12,” in which he describes waiting for Lillian so long that “nothing else in this God’s hell meant anything.” He tells his absent lover:

I had everything you love—shellfish and
saltsticks … watercress,
black olives. Wine (for the watch I pawned), real cream
for our coffee. Smoked cheese, currants in port, preserved
wild cherries.

I bought purple asters from a pushcart florist and placed
them where
they would be between us—
imagining your lovely face among them …

When Lillian forsakes him and his snacks, he is crestfallen and roves nighttime streets where “the glittering pile, Manhattan, swarmed like an uncovered dung heap” and the steeple of St. Mark’s rises “mouldy with moonlight.” Elsewhere, he lays his emotions bare, as in the first entry, “April 28”: “I need your love, / I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink // Because slow negative death withers the world—and only yes / can turn the tide.”

On page after page, he’s like a prototype of Lloyd Dobler, the clueless romantic John Cusack plays in Say Anything. Much like the hero of a rom-com, he doesn’t want only to bone; he wants a relationship. He is boyfriend material. Each winter, he promises, “there will be long evenings together to forget, reading or talking—having friends.” He wants not just to “move nearer, / nearer heaven—until I burst inside you like a screaming rocket,” but also all the little quotidian thrills of “cool mint toothpaste kisses.”

I suspect Benton’s poetry was popular because he recognized the inherent sex appeal of being almost absurdly present. He neither dwells on the past nor frets about the future. He doesn’t think about the news or look at his phone. He’s there with his beloved, Lillian, in the fullness of the moment, minus distractions. Each poem flaunts the allure of being here now, of embodying the cliché of lovers feeling like the only two people in the world. But Benton takes this a step further: his lovers are the only two people in the space-time continuum. (An article in the Atlantic last year asked: “Why are young people having so little sex?” The author partly blamed a culture awash in distractions. There are no distractions whatsoever in Benton.)

As he writes in “Entry June 12”: “Sleep late, nobody cares what time it is. / Sunday morning, coffee in bed … then love / with coffee flavored kisses,” adding “I have been hours awake looking at you lithely at rest in the free / natural way rivers bed and clouds shape.” He approaches his subject in an unhurried way, and there’s something dated yet beguiling about his grand romantic tableaux put across with utmost sincerity.

His lack of inhibition also captures the intoxicated throes of romantic love with a vividness that feels intoxicating unto itself. A contact high of sorts, as in “Entry October 31”:

The wind is soft, the rain is
beautiful—
what did you do to the wind, and the rain, and the clouds?

And to me?
See, I am drunk, high … I am drunk on you as on a reefer!

He’s so euphoric over Lillian that he can scarcely articulate how drugs work.

In 2005, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher conducted a groundbreaking study in which she scanned the brains of 2,500 college students who were shown photographs of their beloveds and of their acquaintances. The former images caused the “brains to become active in regions rich with dopamine, the so-called feel-good neurotransmitter,” per a write-up of the study in the Harvard Medical School blog. In a subsequent TED Talk, Fisher noted, “It’s part of what we cal

[Sue Bridgwater · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's curious what roads may lead you to a particular book. The only association the phrase 'This is my beloved' had for me for years is that of the song I used to hear as a child, which I now know came from the musical Kismet (1953)

So when I was indulging myself in re-runs of Kojak from the 1970s, I was intrigued to find a book with that title featured briefly in one episode, when a character takes it from the shelf and tells Kojak she knew her former partner was really unhappy because he was always reading (!) and mostly reading this book.

I searched online and found a mixed critical and reading response to the poem sequence from its first publication in 1943 to the present. Some found it pornographic, others erotic; some found it crass and embarrassing, others lyrical and beautiful. Some thought it was screamingly funny. It's certainly extremely personal and private, especially in the first sections, though it becomes more universal in application as it progresses. I would say it bears comparison with 'At Grand Central Station I sat down and wept,' although no doubt many would shoot me for that.

Well, I gave it 4 stars for what I perceive as its strengths. Here are some links:

Full text of the book: http://hierographics.tripod.com/Liter...

Life of Walter Benton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_...

Lyrics of the (unrelated but also erotic!) song: https://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/kisme...

[Evelin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walter Benton is quite a talented free verse poet. He also seems to be a very sad, horny man.
I picked this collection up again now that I’ve studied some poetry and I think I see it with a clearer eye. It’s an interesting book. Four parts, one of love, three of separation. Benton suffers from classic lovesickness which is, for the most part, centered on his beloved’s body. At many points I thought that “love” could easily be replaced with “lust” with little consequence, but it’s not devoid of the former. It leaves me with a sense of longing, almost like Benton imprinted his own loss onto me at the last page.
I can’t help but wonder what Lillian must have thought of all this. Her and Benton certainly weren’t together when it was published—I mean, if my ex suddenly dedicated an entire book of semi-pornographic poems about me, to me, and published it with my name on the third page—does that not seem like the 1943 equivalent of a modern day purposeful nude leak?
Benton swears he doesn’t know why they broke up, but from the crumbs he leaves of Lillians expressions in part two, she was the one who left, for some grim reason.
Beautiful lines though. “Leaving their bodies like old clothes upon the shore.”

[Helen Pugsley · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's strange to read something so erotic from the 1940's. I keep reminding myself this is my great grandparents making my grandparents. There is nothing new under the sun.
As a result, I find Benton's work relatable. The way he talks about his lady love is empowering to me. He even talks about her pubic hair and her chin hair. It's really a shame that they parted.
My copy is old and smells like heady perfume that I feel fit the age group of someone reading this...Weirder still I only have vague ideas about how it got in my house. It appears to be a book sale book.
Either way, beautiful collection of poetry. Reads like a diary! Now I need to track down the author's first publication.

[Brianne Sax · Rating 5 out of 5]

My all time favorite book of all time.

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What enslaving cocktail have I sucked
from your full mouth …
to leave me so totally yours !"

"Because love has your face and body ... and your hands are tender
and your mouth is sweet -- and God has made no other eyes like yours"

"Your breasts are snub like children's faces ... and your navel deep
as god's eye
Yes, your lips match your teats beautifully, rose and rose"

[Elizabeth A.]

lovely

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

sexy.

[Frances Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

People in falling in love cherish the experiences these poems bring.

[D Maurice Waddell]

Beautifully written.....

[Marty Winefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gift from my father as a teenager. I return to this collection often. Now it is time to pass on to my own teenager.

[Karalyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

a favorite... hard to find!