Passion on the Page

You've invested years of blood, sweat and, in my case, HB pencils in the British Library to construct your tale of deep passion and pent-up desire and now – at last – your central characters are edging towards the bedroom. At which point you start to suffer from writer's droop. How are you going to encapsulate the earth-moving wonder, the erotic arousal and tender protectiveness of the longed-for moment?

We've visited the topic several times before but Maeve Haran's piece in The Telegraph asking why is sex so hard to put into words, is well worth a read. The character she needed to plunge into the thick of the action in her latest novel The Lady and The Poet is no other than John Donne :

... perhaps the greatest erotic love poet in the English language, whose poetry glitters with clever seductiveness, carnal longing

and clearly a tough act to follow.