literary critic camille paglia calls "love's body" "one of the most famous and influential books of my college years." sam keen notes that "love's body" is very different in approach from brown's previous book, "life against death" (1959): "the old style is no more. gone are the rational arguments supporting the end of argumentation, the prose defending poetry, the reasoned appeals for ecstasy. in their place are aphorism, poetry, and free association. playfully and with abundant exaggeration brown paints a portrait of the divinely inspired schizophrenic who transforms the world by poetic imagination and by his refusal to accept the boundaries that define the normal (or average) sense of reality." brown commented of the book that, "i did feel when writing "love's body" some kind of obligation to undo what i had done in "life against death". i wanted to release any followers i had acquired or at least to confuse them. [...] i felt under some existential stress to write "love's body" in order to torpedo "life against death", to destroy it as a position."