Gay Love Poetry

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Gay love poetry has enriched and enlivened our culture for more than two thousand years. This wide-ranging collection includes a generous selection of work stretching from classical times — Homer, Virgil, Catullus, Martial — to contemporary writers such as Edwin Morgan, Thom Gunn and Gregory Woods. The English Renaissance is richly represented, both by the major figures of Marlowe and Shakespeare and by less well-known but intriguing poets such as Barnfield and Drayton. The nineteenth century provides vital poems by Tennyson, Whitman and Wilde. Essential European texts, from Michelangelo to Verlaine, are given in translation. Many poems, by both new and established poets, appear here for the first time in book form. Gay Love Poetry is arranged thematically, whether focusing on the pastoral and elegiac, on different aspects of the gay life or on poems which may not have been conceived as gay love poetry by their authors but which have certainly been perceived as such by their readers. The result is above all a collection of marvellous poems, one which makes a compelling case for the central place of gay writing in our literary culture.