1855: A Stop-Press Revision

Discovers two variants of line 1118 of the 1855 poem eventually entitled "Song of Myself," indicating that Whitman interrupted the printing of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to make a significant revision

Suppressing the Gay Whitman in America: Translating Thomas Mann

Examines Mann\u27s 1922 speech "On the German Republic," in which Mann uses Whitman\u27s Calamus poems to evoke Eros as "the figurehead of his democratic republic"; investigates why the key passage about Whitman\u27s "manly love of comrades" is missing in Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter\u27s English translation of the speech; reprints the missing passage in the original German and an English translation; and gives an overview of "the history of Leaves of Grass in German-speaking countries" and "Mann\u27s encounter with Hans Reisiger\u27s Whitman translations.

Two Resplendent Suns: Dante Alighieri and Walt Whitman

This essay presents an overview of the similarities in career-arc/autobiography, aesthetic, philosophical, and political views of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Walt Whitman, focusing largely in their respective masterpieces the Comedy  and Leaves of Grass

Shakespeare and the Poet\u27s Life

Shakespeare and the Poet\u27s Life explores a central biographical question: why did Shakespeare choose to cease writing sonnets and court-focused long poems like The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis and continue writing plays? Author Gary Schmidgall persuasively demonstrates the value of contemplating the professional reasons Shakespeare—or any poet of the time—ceased being an Elizabethan court poet and focused his efforts on drama and the Globe. Students of Shakespeare and of Renaissance poetry will find Schmidgall\u27s approach and conclusions both challenging and illuminating. Gary Schmidgall is professor of English at Hunter College and the author of numerous books. Argues persuasively that the image of the poet offered in Renaissance historical documents can illuminate Shakespeare\u27s own views. —South Atlantic Review Impressive in its range and scholarship; it is also gracefully and tactfully written. —Shakespeare Bulletinhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1066/thumbnail.jp

‘A Girl's Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women: a Cultural Review on 15/09/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.585045.This article explores the relationship between the poet Olive Custance and her husband Lord Alfred Douglas, arguing that Custance constructed Douglas as a male muse figure in her poetry, particularly the sequence ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ (Rainbows 1902). The introduction sets out Custance's problematic historical positioning as a ‘decadent’ poet who published nothing following the Great War, but whose work came too late to fit into strictly ‘fin de siècle’ categories. I suggest, however, that Custance's oscillating constructions of gender and sexuality make her more relevant to the concerns of modernity than has previously been acknowledged and her work anticipates what is now termed ‘queer’. The first main section of the article traces the cultural background of the fin de siècle male muse, arguing that Custance's key influences—male homoerotic writers such as Wilde and Pater—meant it was logical that she should imagine the muse as male, despite the problems associated with gender-reversals of the muse-poet relationship which have been identified by several feminist critics. I then move on to focus specifically on how Shakespearean discourses of gender performance and cross-dressing played a key role in Custance and Douglas's courtship, as they exchanged the fluid roles of ‘Prince’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Page’. The penultimate section of the article focuses on discourses of fairy tale and fantasia in Custance's ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ sequence, in which these fantasy roles contribute to a construction of Douglas as a feminised object, and the relationship between the ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ is described in terms of narcissistic sameness. My paper concludes by tracing the demise of Custance and Douglas's relationship; as Douglas attempted to be more ‘manly’, he sought to escape the role of object, resulting in Custance losing her male muse. But her sexually-dissident constructions of the male muse remain important experiments worthy of critical attention