Homoerotic poetry
Encyclopedia
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry of the male-male erotic tradition that contains poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas
, Walt Whitman
, Federico García Lorca
, W. H. Auden
, Fernando Pessoa
and Allen Ginsberg
.
In the female-female tradition, there are poets such as Sappho
, "Michael Field", and Maureen Duffy
. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson
to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
and in the Western canon is that of the sonnets
by William Shakespeare
. Though some critics
have made assertions, some in efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility, to its being 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 fairly explicitly 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
in the twentieth century the pederast
Ralph Chubb
lived in poverty
and produced his own books in limited editions made from illustrated engraving
s (similar to methods employed by William Blake
), which he then erased.
In the 19th century the British gay poet Digby Mackworth Dolben
is a little known poet; in the last decade Lord Alfred Douglas
produced a major gay volume with his Poems (1896) published in Paris in 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 Sir Noel 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 Australia
n 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 form 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).
an gay anthology was in German
compiled by Elisar von Kupffer
(1900); it was followed by the poetry and prose anthology Iolaus compiled by the homosexual British socialist Edward Carpenter
, which has remained in print almost continuously until today. The 1978 anthology French gay anthology with much poetry and excellent illustrations, Lamoure bleu (French for "blue love", that is, forbidden love) has been translated into German and English and remains in print.
Italian has Michelangelo
, the painter and sculptor, who wrote gay love sonnets while Sandro Penna
is a later poet. The Venetian
gay poet Mario Stefani
died in still unexplained circumstances in the early 21st century. Renzo Paris is a notable contemporary poet.
In French there is Rimbaud and Verlaine
, who were lovers; some of Verlaine's poems published in the early 1890s were the first open modern French gay poems and influenced Oscar Wilde. Jean Cocteau
wrote in the twentieth century where Jean Genet
also wrote some gay poems.
In German Adolf Brand
wrote gay poetry in the early part of the twentieth century as well as producing the major gay periodical Der Eigene (The Special; 1898–1931), which published gay poetry. The Swiss
gay magazine Der Kreis (The circle) carried the flame of gay poetry in the second world war when the Nazi regime in Germany imprisoned many homosexuals, leading to their deaths. Nils Hallbeck was a Swedish gay poet and in the opinion of Anthony Reid, his English translator, one of the finest gay poets ever. Danish and Dutch have also produced fine gay poets.
Spain
produced Garcia Lorca, who was shot in the Spanish civil war
, and many others. For South America
n poets, see the bilingual anthology Now the Volcano (San Francisco, 1979). Antonio Botto
is the best known Portuguese
poet to write open gay poems; he later lived in Brazil
where he died. In Brazil, a gay anthology was produced in 1978 called Poemas do amor mandate (Poems of doomed love).
n has Kuzmin
and Gennady Trifonov (who was imprisoned for writing homosexual poems which were not at the time published). Valery Pereleshin lived in exile in Brazil where he produced a significant body of gay poetry. Poland
had gay poets in the early part of the twentieth century and has an increasingly open gay culture. Brane Mozetic writes in Slovene.
Turkey has a huge gay poetry heritage as does medieval Hebrew
. Hebrew gay poetry has been discussed by Norman Roth, Jefim Schirmann and Dan Pagis and dates from the Middle Ages
in Spain. C. M. Naim surveyed gay poetry in an article in Studies in the Urdu ghazal and Prose Fiction (1979) and Ralph Russell
has dealt with the subject in various books.
Very little is known about oral homosexual poems in Africa
n cultures.
Abu Nuwas
Abu-Nuwas al-Hasan ben Hani Al-Hakami ,a known as Abū-Nuwās , was one of the greatest of classical Arabic poets, who also composed in Persian on occasion. Born in the city of Ahvaz in Persia, of an Arab father and a Persian mother, he became a master of all the contemporary genres of Arabic poetry...
, Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
, W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
, Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa , was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.-Early years in Durban:On 13 July...
and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
.
In the female-female tradition, there are poets such as Sappho
Sappho
Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...
, "Michael Field", and Maureen Duffy
Maureen Duffy
Maureen Patricia Duffy is a contemporary British poet, playwright and novelist. She has also published a literary biography of Aphra Behn, and The Erotic World of Faery a book-length study of eroticism in faery fantasy literature.-Life and work:After a tough childhood, Duffy took her degree in...
. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...
to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
English poetry
The most prominent example in the English languageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
and in the Western canon is that of the sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144...
by William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
. Though some critics
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
have made assertions, some in efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility, to its being 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
Richard Barnfield
Richard Barnfield , English poet, was born at Norbury, Staffordshire, and brought up in Newport, Shropshire.He was baptized on 13 June 1574, the son of Richard Barnfield, gentleman. His obscure though close relationship with Shakespeare has long made him interesting to scholars...
, who in The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia wrote fairly explicitly 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
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
in the twentieth century the pederast
Pederasty
Pederasty or paederasty is an intimate relationship between an adult and an adolescent boy outside his immediate family. The word pederasty derives from Greek "love of boys", a compound derived from "child, boy" and "lover".Historically, pederasty has existed as a variety of customs and...
Ralph Chubb
Ralph Chubb
Ralph Nicholas Chubb was an English poet, printer, and artist. Heavily influenced by Whitman, Blake, and the Romantics, his work was the creation of a highly intricate personal mythology, one that was anti-materialist and sexually revolutionary.-Life:Ralph Chubb was born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire...
lived in poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
and produced his own books in limited editions made from illustrated engraving
Engraving
Engraving is the practice of incising a design on to a hard, usually flat surface, by cutting grooves into it. The result may be a decorated object in itself, as when silver, gold, steel, or glass are engraved, or may provide an intaglio printing plate, of copper or another metal, for printing...
s (similar to methods employed by William Blake
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
), which he then erased.
In the 19th century the British gay poet Digby Mackworth Dolben
Digby Mackworth Dolben
Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben was an English poet who died young from drowning. He owes his poetic reputation to his cousin, Robert Bridges, poet laureate from 1913 to 1930, who edited a partial edition of his verse, Poems, in 1911.He was born in Guernsey, and brought up at Finedon Hall...
is a little known poet; in the last decade Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Douglas
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas , nicknamed Bosie, was a British author, poet and translator, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde...
produced a major gay volume with his Poems (1896) published in Paris in English and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
translations after the trial of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
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
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman , usually known as A. E. Housman, was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems were mostly written before 1900...
gave voice to gay feelings of fear and guilt in a still-criminalized situation in his A Shropshire Lad
A Shropshire Lad
A Shropshire Lad is a cycle of sixty-three poems by the English poet Alfred Edward Housman . Some of the better-known poems in the book are "To an Athlete Dying Young", "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" and "When I Was One-and-Twenty".The collection was published in 1896...
(1896). In the twentieth century Sir Noel Coward wrote witty gay poems while the magician Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley
Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...
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
Bankruptcy
Bankruptcy is a legal status of an insolvent person or an organisation, that is, one that cannot repay the debts owed to creditors. In most jurisdictions bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor....
. The excellent Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
gay poet Ian Young produced the first major bibliography with his works The Male Homosexual in Literature (2 editions, the second being expanded). The Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n 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
Gay Liberation
Gay liberation is the name used to describe the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement of the late 1960s and early to mid 1970s in North America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand...
(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
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
in the late 18th century and in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
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
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
. Daryl Hine form Canada and David Herkt and Paul Knobel from Australia have written fine gay poems. New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
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
Bangkok
Bangkok is the capital and largest urban area city in Thailand. It is known in Thai as Krung Thep Maha Nakhon or simply Krung Thep , meaning "city of angels." The full name of Bangkok is Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom...
; repatriated to Canada, he remained bedridden. His complete poems were only published in the early 21st century. The British poet Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn , was an Anglo-American poet who was praised both for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style...
lived in the United States and wrote a notable volume inspired by AIDS
AIDS
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus...
(which has produced several anthologies).
European poetry
The first modern EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an gay anthology was in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
compiled by Elisar von Kupffer
Elisar von Kupffer
Elisar von Kupffer was an artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym 'Elisarion' for much of his writing.He studied at St. Petersburg and then Berlin...
(1900); it was followed by the poetry and prose anthology Iolaus compiled by the homosexual British socialist Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter
Edward Carpenter was an English socialist poet, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist....
, which has remained in print almost continuously until today. The 1978 anthology French gay anthology with much poetry and excellent illustrations, Lamoure bleu (French for "blue love", that is, forbidden love) has been translated into German and English and remains in print.
Italian has Michelangelo
Michelangelo
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni , commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art...
, the painter and sculptor, who wrote gay love sonnets while Sandro Penna
Sandro Penna
Sandro Penna was an Italian poet.-Biography:Born in Perugia, Penna lived in Rome for most of his life....
is a later poet. The Venetian
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
gay poet Mario Stefani
Mario Stefani
Mario Stefani was an Italian poet....
died in still unexplained circumstances in the early 21st century. Renzo Paris is a notable contemporary poet.
In French there is Rimbaud and Verlaine
Verlaine
Verlaine is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region and Province of Liege. On January 1, 2006 Verlaine had a total population of 3,507. The total area is 24.21 km² which gives a population density of 145 inhabitants per km². The municipality contains the villages...
, who were lovers; some of Verlaine's poems published in the early 1890s were the first open modern French gay poems and influenced Oscar Wilde. Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
wrote in the twentieth century where Jean Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
also wrote some gay poems.
In German Adolf Brand
Adolf Brand
Adolf Brand was a German writer, individualist anarchist and pioneering campaigner for the acceptance of male bisexuality and homosexuality.-Biography:...
wrote gay poetry in the early part of the twentieth century as well as producing the major gay periodical Der Eigene (The Special; 1898–1931), which published gay poetry. The Swiss
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
gay magazine Der Kreis (The circle) carried the flame of gay poetry in the second world war when the Nazi regime in Germany imprisoned many homosexuals, leading to their deaths. Nils Hallbeck was a Swedish gay poet and in the opinion of Anthony Reid, his English translator, one of the finest gay poets ever. Danish and Dutch have also produced fine gay poets.
Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
produced Garcia Lorca, who was shot in the Spanish civil war
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
, and many others. For South America
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
n poets, see the bilingual anthology Now the Volcano (San Francisco, 1979). Antonio Botto
António Botto
António Botto was a Portuguese aesthete and modernist poet.- Early life :...
is the best known Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
poet to write open gay poems; he later lived in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
where he died. In Brazil, a gay anthology was produced in 1978 called Poemas do amor mandate (Poems of doomed love).
Baltic & Middle Eastern
RussiaRussia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n has Kuzmin
Kuzmin
-Places:*Kuzmin, Kosovo, a village in Kosovo*Kuzmin , a village in Serbia*Kuzmyn, a village in Ukraine*Kuźmina, a village in Poland-People:Kuzmin or Kuzmina is a popular Russian surname shared by:...
and Gennady Trifonov (who was imprisoned for writing homosexual poems which were not at the time published). Valery Pereleshin lived in exile in Brazil where he produced a significant body of gay poetry. Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
had gay poets in the early part of the twentieth century and has an increasingly open gay culture. Brane Mozetic writes in Slovene.
Turkey has a huge gay poetry heritage as does medieval Hebrew
Medieval Hebrew
Medieval Hebrew has many features that distinguish it from older forms of Hebrew. These affect grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and also include a wide variety of new lexical items, which are usually based on older forms....
. Hebrew gay poetry has been discussed by Norman Roth, Jefim Schirmann and Dan Pagis and dates from the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
in Spain. C. M. Naim surveyed gay poetry in an article in Studies in the Urdu ghazal and Prose Fiction (1979) and Ralph Russell
Ralph Russell
Professor Ralph Russell SI was a British scholar of Urdu literature and a Communist. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, UK. He taught Urdu and Urdu literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and also in universities in India and Pakistan...
has dealt with the subject in various books.
Very little is known about oral homosexual poems in Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
n cultures.
Further reading
- Paul Knobel, An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History (2002; cdrom).* Paul Knobel, A World Overview of Male Homosexual Poetry (2005).
- Anthony Reid, The Eternal Flame, 2 volumes (1992–2002); English language anthology covering all continents of the world.
- Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (Yale University Press, 1998).
- Gregory Woods, Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (Yale University Press, 1987).
- Ian Young, The Male Homosexual in Literature, second edition (1982).