Stephen Burt on Poetry for Pride Month
Beacon Press’s very interesting blog the Beacon Broadside recently featured Stephen Burt’s excellent post on gay and lesbian poetry. In the piece, Burt provides a concise and thoughtful history of gay and lesbian poetry and depictions of same-sex erotic passion from Sappho to the present day. He highlights many of the key figures, including Walt Whitman, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, and W. H. Auden.
Burt also offers two of his favorite works by queer poets: D. A. Powell’s Tea and Liz Waldner’s Dark Would.
Another poet Burt mentions in his post is Thom Gunn, whose work he discusses in greater detail in his most recent work, The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence.