Reserve and reticence can result from so many different causes that they are hard to read accurately. They can come from emotional coldness, from prudishness, from shyness, from timidity, from privacy, from secretiveness, from hauteur, from humility, and so on. Their relationship to sex is complicated. I find banter to be very sexy, for instance, but indirectness is part of its essence. Like Cally, I find Dickinson's poetry to be very passionate, almost painfully so, but I think it is the extreme restraint that her writing observes that makes the emotion more piercing. On the other hand, I also like Catullus, Martial, Sharon Olds, and other writers who are direct and even graphic in their language. Is one allowed only to like one approach and not the other?
Susan
|