Selected Poems by Emil Aarestrup

Authors

Keywords

Danish poetry, literature, amorous poems

Abstract

The name of the Danish physician and poet Emil Aarestrup is associated with sensual, erotic poetry in which a sharp, anatomical eye for the beauty of the human body is joined with a profound narrative about love in a single embrace. In Aarestrup’s works the body comes alive. His erotic gaze is ever-present as a layer of desire in his work, just as his sense of the all-inclusive joy of the embrace conceptualizes pleasure of an explosive and outrageous kind. This was incompatible with the puritanical petit-bourgeois self-restraint and human isolation of the period in which he wrote. This celebration of the erotic permeates his poetry with a modern consciousness of man’s sensual nature, independent of time and space. In Aarestrup’s work, we encounter a poet of Denmark’s Golden Age breaking through the social mores of his time and writing himself onto the European poetic stage.

Recommended Citation

(2016) "Selected Poems by Emil Aarestrup," The Bridge: Vol. 39: No. 2, Article 10.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thebridge/vol39/iss2/10