Homoerotic poetry

Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Abu Nuwas, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.

The most prominent example in the English language and in the Western canon is that of the sonnets by William Shakespeare. Though some critics have made efforts to preserve Shakespeare's literary credibility by claiming his work to be non-erotic in nature, no critic has disputed that the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets concern explicitly male-male love poetry. The only other Renaissance artist writing in English to do this was the poet Richard Barnfield, who, in The Affectionate Shepherd and Cynthia, wrote homoerotic poetry. Barnfield's poems, furthermore, are now widely accepted as a major influence upon Shakespeare's.

In the twentieth century, W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg became well known as poets. In Great Britain the pederast Ralph Chubb lived in poverty and produced his own books in limited editions made from illustrated engravings (similar to methods employed by William Blake), which he then erased.

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