Continuum
Whitman's Queer Children : America's Homosexual Epics
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Whitman's Queer Children
Author(s): Catherine A. Davies
Davies examines the work of four of the most important twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991). Although not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, this book considers Whitman's renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. If, as Bakhtin suggests, the job of epic is to “accomplish the task of cultural, national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world,” the idea of the “homosexual epic” fundamentally problematizes the traditional aims of the genre.
Review(s):
“Davies presents a well-researched analysis of not only the poems, but of the poets, the historical contexts and societies during which they lived and wrote, and, not least importantly, of the ways in which each, in his own way, engaged with the burden of living and writing in the shadow of the man who first (publicly) expressed the need for America to consider a more diverse and inclusive identity.” —Chisomo Kalinga, King's College London
ISBN: 9781441192622
Author(s): Catherine A. Davies
Davies examines the work of four of the most important twentieth-century poets who have explored the epic tradition. Some of the poems display an explicit concern with ideas of American nationhood, while others emulate the formal ambitions and encyclopaedic scope of the epic poem. The study undertakes extensive close readings of Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930), Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” (1956) and The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-71 (1972), James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), and John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991). Although not primarily an account of a Whitmanian lineage, this book considers Whitman's renegotiation of the dialectic between the public and the private as a context for the project of the homosexual epic, arguing for the existence of a genealogy of epic poems that rethink the relationship between these two spheres. If, as Bakhtin suggests, the job of epic is to “accomplish the task of cultural, national, and political centralization of the verbal-ideological world,” the idea of the “homosexual epic” fundamentally problematizes the traditional aims of the genre.
Review(s):
“Davies presents a well-researched analysis of not only the poems, but of the poets, the historical contexts and societies during which they lived and wrote, and, not least importantly, of the ways in which each, in his own way, engaged with the burden of living and writing in the shadow of the man who first (publicly) expressed the need for America to consider a more diverse and inclusive identity.” —Chisomo Kalinga, King's College London
ISBN: 9781441192622