Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic

Laila Abdalla is an associate professor of English at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, and former professor at McGill University.

Stephen Guy-Bray wishes to propose the union between male lovers, rather
than the traditional “son and father,” to describe the relationship
between a poet and his predecessor. This homosexual attachment, he
argues, forms a nexus for nationhood in the poetry of Dante, Edmund
Spenser, and Hart Crane. The works of these poets are metaconsciously
indebted to Statius and Virgil, Chaucer, and Walt Whitman, respectively,
and the poets’ “situate homoeroticism” is at the heart of the
oeuvres, which couple poetry and nationhood. But Guy-Bray’s
association between the homoerotic reimagining of the authorial
relationship and nationhood is infrequently addressed, and the angle
underdeveloped. This book, quite simply, has a fallible premise and
thesis.

More problematically, Guy-Bray’s analyses are founded on speculative
and coincidental “evidence.” For example, gay love is more apt as a
metaphor than paternal love because sons perceive their fathers with
both hostility and love, while poets speak of their predecessors only
with “respect and affection.” Also, “poetic penetration” better
describes what occurs than “poetic inspiration.” Another example of
tenuous argumentation: The Inferno describes “sodomites” running in
circles on burning sand. In medieval allegory, the image reveals the
unproductive and self-destructive nature of homosexuality. Yet Guy-Bray
concludes that Dante is suggesting that “sodomy is in some sense
required for poetry.” He reasons that since Jeremy Tambling explains
sodomy as “an activity that frustrates teleology,
goal-directedness,” and that The Inferno’s Pilgrim has strayed from
the “right path,” and that without such straying the author would
have never written the poem, poetry needs sodomy. This logic is specious
at best, as is the slippage between character and author. Guy-Bray
further argues that the facts that the pilgrim has “two textual
fathers” (Statius and Virgil, his guides) and “no mother,”
(Guy-Bray seems to forget the Virgin Mary, and also Beatrice, who sent
Virgil), and that Dante does not name the poem until after the
“sodomites” appear, “might lead us to think of sodomy as
productive, if not reproductive.”

Guy-Bray’s text is full of such logical fallacies, and when added to
the limited sense of the disparate contexts of the Italian Middle Ages,
English Renaissance, and American early 20th century, it appears to be
running in circles on burning sand itself.