Gay and Lesbian Poetry by James J. Wilhelm

Gay and Lesbian Poetry

An Anthology from Sappho to Michelangelo

James J. Wilhelm

Rutgers medievalist Wilhelm’s ambitious survey collects European homoerotic poetry from 7th century B.C.E. Greece through the Italian Renaissance. Though Dante, Chaucer, and others deploying gay characters are included, as are a scattering of antihomosexual polemicists, the voice of these poems is typically a mature gay man (Sappho is one of but a few women represented), the object a smooth-cheeked youth. Selections from medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry provide some of this anthology’s most disarming reading (e.g., Imn Shuhaid’s ‘he passed me in a herd of deer, a smiling moon with lucky teeth’) as well as evidencing the improbable license apparently then possible under Islamic rule. Though generally capable, the translators sometimes resort to anachronisms (a calculator in a Juvenal satire?) and contemporary subculture argot to mixed effect. And aside from brief introductions to each section and to individual poets, the annotations are minimal – too minimal, perhaps, for many a lay reader without a literary dictionary immediately at hand. For more scholarly collections. Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.

Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amid much blather about the alrightnik Western Literary Canon, child porn, and sexopolitical correctness (mostly neo-conservative, lesser on the left), here’s an old Classical tradition long censored and banished from academics, re-emerged into intelligent light: a heroic humorous homoerotic counterculture live from Sappho to Plato & Vergil, thru Medieval Latin, Arabic, Hebrew and provincial languages, up thru Renaissance to Michelangelo. It gives courage to post Whitmanic contemporaries who’ve come out of the Industrial Age closet.

–Allen Ginsberg

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