Who are your favorite gay poets?

Walt Whitman

WH Auden

Emily Dickinson (? who knows what that lithe spirit was)

James Fenton

Hart Crane

R1 I’m a sucker Whitman. Bitch made me love poetry.

R3 Honestly I couldn't get into Leaves of Grass in college. Might try reading the collection again. What are your favorites?

I always liked the work of (bisexual, leaning toward men) Seigfreid Sassoon.

Rumi and Shams

Although Rumi soars above

Bump.

Alex Dimitrov, who's living, is very good and very gay.

Hi, R8. I love Alex Dmitrov.

This is my favorite piece of his. It hits hard.

Robert Graves

Whitman (I think he does change as one gets older. It's also why he kept writing LoG several times over through his life. And to me he has to be heard out loud - like Ginsberg. Ginsberg out loud is so much better than Ginsberg only in the eyes. But I digress.)

Cavafy (his erotic-lite poems hit me so much harder than more explicit Gay poets).

Auden

Thom Gunn (He wasn't much for me when I was younger, but in the last year I've read and newly appreciated his stuff.)

Frank O'Hara

Lorca

TS Eliot (I but the argument he was latent...and the... frisson?.... of his closed down yearnings make it hotter. I just know the young French guy who died in the war was the love of his life - not that middlin' Unitarian in Massachusetts.)

I can’t believe you guys forgot Rod McKuen!

I want to like Hart Crane more than I do. There are lines that just shatter, but whole poems seem so obtuse and don't invite me to take the time to let them do their work. Other poets, Baudelaire, Rimbaud etc are also difficult but seem to return more on the invest.

And let's not forget the ladies : the Grim and Scary Ann Sexton (I like) and Adrienne Rich (whom I want to like more than... oh, never mind).

But a great, great poet, not just to list because she was a Lesbian: Elizabeth Bishop. Few poems, but some of the best of her century.

Ok, I'll shut up now.

Bump, for the new year. Surely there must be some who read poetry on DL.

Federico Garcia Lorca

Langston Hughes

Walt Whitman

Maya Angelou

Rupert Brooke

all of them. duh!

Was Lord Byron gay? All the paintings and pictures I see of him make him out to be a very handsome man. I fantasize that he was gay and made love to the many men he met in his travels.

R17 Byron was pansexual. He'd fuck cousins, half-sisters, married women, men. No hole was safe from his attentions. Eventually he had to leave England to avoid charges of buggery.

Emily Dickinson rocks !

John Ashbery.

(Emily Dickinson fell in love with several different men, there's no evidence she should be on this list.)

Emily was romantic with her brother’s wife . Back in the 1800’s puritan Massachusetts, you have to fake being straight . She could be no, but no way totally straight

Could be bi ☝🏼

R20, I have read the collected letters of Emily Dickinson, and of course her cunning manner made it plain that her relationships with numerous women were boldly personal, intimate and romantic. She never had sex with a man, but she was direct in her (likely not acted on) sexuality. It's called "metaphor."

Heaney, Yeats, Larkin, Ted Hughes, Auden, Emily Dickinson, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Eliot, Dylan Thomas

Oh fuck I missed the gay part

Kit Marlowe. Very Pagan, very debauched, very smug and rude, very gay. Love it.

R24 Ha, I thought we were going to get a whole lot of DL "I know he's gay!!" info. I think Larkin was probably the most non-gay poet I can think of. Mega hetero sleaze.

DL Fave Dylan Geick.