Homoerotic Poetry - English Poetry

English Poetry

The most prominent example in the English language and in the Western canon is that of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. Though some critics have made efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility by claiming his work to be non-erotic in nature, no critic has disputed that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets concern explicitly male-male love poetry. The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who, in The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia, wrote homoerotic poetry. Barnfield's poems, furthermore, are now widely accepted as a major influence upon Shakespeare's.

In the twentieth century, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg became well known as poets. In Great Britain the pederast Ralph Chubb lived in poverty and produced his own books in limited editions made from illustrated engravings (similar to methods employed by William Blake), which he then erased.

During the 19th century the British gay poet Digby Mackworth Dolben was little known; however, in the last decade Lord Alfred Douglas produced a major volume of Dolben's homoerotic poems (1896) published in Paris, written in both English and French translations after the trial of Oscar Wilde for homosexual offences brought about largely by Wilde's love for Douglas. Wilde in De Profundis, a poem about his prison experiences which broke him and led to his death in 1900 in Paris, produced an enduring poem. At the same time A. E. Housman gave voice to gay feelings of fear and guilt in a still-criminalized situation in his A Shropshire Lad (1896). In the twentieth century Noël Coward wrote witty gay poems while the magician Aleister Crowley wrote works in English.

The British savant Anthony Reid created the largest male homosexual anthology of poems: The Eternal Flame (2 volumes, 1992–2002) which he worked on for nearly fifty years; publication of the second volume was held up by the publisher going bankrupt. The excellent Canadian gay poet Ian Young produced the first major bibliography with his works The Male Homosexual in Literature (2 editions, the second being expanded). The Australian gay poet Paul Knobel's CD-ROM 'An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History' (2002) is the largest survey of the subject and comes to one million words with overviews covering over 250 languages and language groups. He has also published A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry (2005). Gregory Woods has produced other studies, including a history of gay literature with some reference to poetry.

The period since gay liberation (from 1968) has produced dozens of gay poetry anthologies (e.g. 2 edited by Ian Young alone and others by Winston Leyland producer of the excelleny gay lib periodical Gay Sunshine, which included poetry); this has mainly been the result of the increasing decriminalisation of gay sex in the Anglo world (male homosexual acts were decriminalized in France in the late 18th century and in Italy in the late 19th). Notable United States gay poets include Dennis Cooper, Gavin Dillard, John Gill, Dennis Kelly, Tom Meyer, Paul Monette, Harold Norse and Jonathan Williams. Jamse S. Holmes was a leather poet who emigrated to Amsterdam. Daryl Hine from Canada and David Herkt and Paul Knobel from Australia have written fine gay poems. New Zealand has a vibrant gay culture and has produced some gay poets. The Canadian gay poet Edward A. Lacey died after being run over in the street while drunk in Bangkok; repatriated to Canada, he remained bedridden. His complete poems were only published in the early 21st century. The British poet Thom Gunn lived in the United States and wrote a notable volume inspired by AIDS (which has produced several anthologies).