The Literary Love of Men and Women
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/04/2009_43_fri.shtml
Love letters by women to men: pleading, planning, warning, bargaining and ultimately disappointingly banal.
As for poetry, I am afraid the awful truth, gentlemen, is that women are more likely to write love poems to each other than to a man. A man would be embarrassed to receive one and wouldn't know how to respond, particularly if it was very good. The woman would be perceived to have demeaned herself in taking so much trouble over a mere man, and so it would be better for her if she could pass it off as a doggerel written in jest in an idle moment.
When a man writes poetry for a woman, and means it, it is invariably suffused with heroic metaphors, either that, or written in the tone of a conqueror enslaved.
"Do love letters written by men differ in style, sentiment and sincerity to those written by women?" You betcha. Much as I love Peter Mandelson, I have never felt the urge to express it in poetry.
My love poems to women however are real corkers and will one day become as famous as Sappho's fragments ....
http://www.poemofquotes.com/sappho
Love letters by women to men: pleading, planning, warning, bargaining and ultimately disappointingly banal.
As for poetry, I am afraid the awful truth, gentlemen, is that women are more likely to write love poems to each other than to a man. A man would be embarrassed to receive one and wouldn't know how to respond, particularly if it was very good. The woman would be perceived to have demeaned herself in taking so much trouble over a mere man, and so it would be better for her if she could pass it off as a doggerel written in jest in an idle moment.
When a man writes poetry for a woman, and means it, it is invariably suffused with heroic metaphors, either that, or written in the tone of a conqueror enslaved.
"Do love letters written by men differ in style, sentiment and sincerity to those written by women?" You betcha. Much as I love Peter Mandelson, I have never felt the urge to express it in poetry.
My love poems to women however are real corkers and will one day become as famous as Sappho's fragments ....
http://www.poemofquotes.com/sappho
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