Homoerotic poetry

Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with

The most prominent example in the English language and in the Western canon is that of Sonnet 20 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.^[1]

The Uranian poets and prose writers, who sang the praises of the love between men and boys and in doing so often appealed to Ancient Greece, formed a rather cohesive group with a well-expressed philosophy.^[2] Though often anonymously or pseudonymously published or privately circulated, Uranian poetry flourished as a subculture in England in the latter half of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.

During the 19th century the British gay poet

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.^{[citation needed]}

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 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.^{[citation needed]}

The period since

The first modern European gay anthology was Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur compiled by Elisar von Kupffer (1900) in German; 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, L'Amour bleu (French for "blue love", that is, forbidden love) has been translated into German and English and remains in print.^{[citation needed]}

Italian has Michelangelo, the Renaissance painter and sculptor, who wrote homosexual love sonnets while Sandro Penna and Dario Bellezza are twentieth century poets. The Venetian gay poet Mario Stefani died in still unexplained circumstances in the early 21st century. Renzo Paris is a notable contemporary poet.^{[citation needed]}

In French there were

It started to gain importance in the beginning of the 9th century, during the reign of

The fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the 11th century and the subsequent rule of the Almoravids—as well as the division into the Taifa kingdoms—decentralized the culture throughout al-Andalus. This produced producing an era of splendor in poetry.^[6]

The Almohad invasion brought the emergence of all kinds of new literary courts in the centuries 12th and 13th. The greater female autonomy in this North African ethnic group led to the appearance of a greater number of female poets as well—some of whom also created poems that sang of feminine beauty.^[7]

Baltic and middle eastern

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.^{[citation needed]}

Further reading

• Kronenberg, Simeon (October 1, 2015). "Love in Contemporary American Gay Male Poetry in the Works of Richard Siken, Eduardo C Corral and Jericho Brown". Cordite Poetry Review. Retrieved July 9, 2023.
• Knobel, Paul (2005). "English Homosexual Poetry - An Overview". An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry and its Reception History. Archived from the original on May 2, 2010.
• Reid, Anthony (2002). The Eternal Flame: A World Anthology of Homosexual Verse c.2000 B.C. to c.2000 A.D. Vol. 2. Asphodel.
  ISBN 9781893450141
  .
• Reid, Anthony. The Eternal Flame: A World Anthology of Homosexual Verse c.2000 B.C. to c.2000 A.D. Vol. 1.
  OCLC 33014635
  .
• Woods, Gregory (1998). A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. Yale University Press.
  ISBN 0300080883
  .
• Woods, Gregory (1987). Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry. Yale University Press.
  JSTOR j.ctt1dr37w3
  .
• Young, Ian (1982). The Male Homosexual in Literature (second ed.).
  ISBN 978-0810815292
  .
• Gerevich, András; Lane, Ryan (August 4, 2023). "András Gerevich: Queer Erasure". Hungarian Literature Online. Archived from the original on August 6, 2023. Retrieved August 5, 2023. This article by András Gerevich was first published in Hungarian in Magyar Narancs. The English translation is by Ryan Lane.
• Kassai, Zsigmond (June 30, 2023). "Queer Hungarian Literature: On a Path Out of Isolation". Hungarian Literature Online. Archived from the original on July 5, 2023. Retrieved July 6, 2023.

References