Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) UK Poet / Soldier

b. 18 March 1893
d. 4 November 1918

One of the leading English poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen combined the homoeroticism latent in the elegy tradition with precise observation of the horror of trench warfare. Much of Owen's earliest poetry is in the homoerotic tradition that includes Shelley's "Adonais," Tennyson's In Memoriam, and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad: poems that simultaneously celebrate and mourn the beauty of a dead young man.

Owen is regarded by historians as the leading poet of the First World War, known for his war poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare. He had been writing poetry for some years before the war, himself dating his poetic beginnings to a stay at Broxton by the Hill, when he was ten years old.The Romantic poets Keats and Shelley influenced much of Owen's early writing and poetry. His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on Owen's poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems ("Dulce et Decorum Est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth") show direct results of Sassoon's influence. The novel Regeneration by Pat Barker shows this relationship closely. Manuscript copies of the poems survive, annotated in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's poetry would eventually be more widely acclaimed than that of his mentor. While his use of pararhyme, with its heavy reliance on assonance, was innovative, he was not the only poet at the time to use these particular techniques. He was, however, one of the first to experiment with it extensively.

Owen held Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to his mother that he was "not worthy to light [Sassoon's] pipe." On being discharged from Craiglockhart, Owen was stationed on home-duty in Scarborough for several months, during which time he associated with members of the artistic circle into which Sassoon had introduced him, which included Robert Ross and Robert Graves. He also met H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, and it was during this period he developed the stylistic voice for which he is now recognised. Many of his early poems were penned while stationed at the Clarence Garden Hotel, now the Clifton Hotel in Scarborough's North Bay. A blue tourist plaque on the hotel marks its association with Owen.

Robert Graves and Sacheverell Sitwell(who also personally knew him) have stated Owen was a homosexual, and homoeroticism is a central element in much of Owen's poetry.

Through Sassoon, Owen was introduced to a sophisticated homosexual literary circle which included Oscar Wilde's friend Robbie Ross, writer and poet Osbert Sitwell, and Scottish writer C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, the translator of Proust. This contact broadened Owen's outlook, and increased his confidence in incorporating homoerotic elements into his work.

The account of Owen's sexual development has been somewhat obscured because his brother, Harold Owen, removed what he considered discreditable passages in Owen's letters and diaries after the death of their mother. Owen also requested that his mother burn a sack of his personal papers in the event of his death, which she did. Andrew Motion wrote of Owen's relationship with Sassoon: "On the one hand, Sassoon's wealth, posh connections and aristocratic manner appealed to the snob in Owen: on the other, Sassoon's homosexuality admitted Owen to a style of living and thinking that he found naturally sympathetic.

In his early poems, Owen attempted to incorporate the religiosity of his youth. As he grew older, Owen cared less and less for organized religion. "Maundy Thursday" describes churchgoers kissing the cross during a service; the narrator kisses the hands of the boy who holds the cross.

Between the brown hands of a server-ladThe silver cross was offered to be kissed.The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad,And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced.(And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.)Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had,(And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.)Young children came, with eager lips and glad.(These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.)Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte.Above the crucifix I bent my head:The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead:And yet I bowed, yea, kissed - my lips did cling.(I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)

Thom Gunn, poet

b. 29 August 1929 
d. 25 April 2004

The Anglo-American writer Thom Gunn was a major gay poet and a perceptive critic of gay poetry.

Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, and educated at University College School, Bedales and Trinity College, Cambridge. After coming to the United States in 1954, he studied at Stanford and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He won a number of prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the W. H. Smith Award, the Forward Press Award, and the MacArthur Prize.

Gunn's poetry has a popular reputation for sex and drugs and leather. This comes largely from the repeated anthologizing of his early poems from the collections Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1956). In both books, a heroic masculine posing is celebrated as preferable, existentially, to the dull passivity of conformity. His leather boys in the poem "On the Move" are "always nearer by not keeping still." The voice of "Carnal Knowledge" admits that "even in bed I pose."

Posing does not disappear entirely from Gunn's later poems; there is often the sense of looking at looking at looking. And this perspective is exacerbated in the collections after Moly (1971) by hallucinogenic drugs' revelation of a self that can no longer be hidden in a costume.


Probably his greatest poem is the title work of the collection Jack Straw's Castle (1976), a poem in which his poetic ego descends into the maelstrom of dream worlds and nightmare visions: "But night makes me uneasy: floor by floor / Rooms never guessed at." In this maelstrom, Charles Manson (Gunn's one-time neighbor) says to him, "dreams don't come from nowhere: it's your dream / He Says, you dreamt it."


Gunn returned to this experience of nightmare vision with more sense of irony in another long poem, "The Menace," in the next collection, The Passages of Joy (1992). There "the one who wants to get me" turns out to be the reflection of himself in a store window and leads to a comic reflection on our construction of ourselves.


Constant in Gunn's poems from Touch (1967) onward, however, is what one critic has called "imaginative naturalness and greater openness of feeling." This increased naturalness entailed both a loosening of the traditional poetic forms with which he began to write and a greater freedom with the life of the senses and with feeling.


In the title poem, "Touch," a warmth surfaces from "the restraint of habits" and "the black frost / Of outsideness." And twenty-five years later, this warmth reappeared, in a poem addressed to his more-than-forty-years lover, recalling "the stay of your secure firm dry embrace."


From his embrace of the physical came both an ability to risk and some of the finest gay elegies ever written: the poems that give the title to The Man With Night Sweats (1992).


Once again, these poems are characterized by the contemplation of AIDS sufferers contemplating the bodies that they thought they knew. Here the bodily shields are now cracked and the pleasures "the hedonistic body basks within / And takes for granted" have gone away. But so have we who are left:


        dizzy from a sense
Of being ejected with some violence
From vigil in some white and distant spot.

The loss is not simply personal but also of a community that Gunn describes as having been a "supple entwinement of the living mass." We are the Holocaust survivors filing past what leaves us "less defined," "unconfined," and "abandoned incomplete." And yet the greatness of these poems, as works of art, contradicts their ostensible theme of loss.


As a major gay poet, Gunn's influence can be seen on such other gay poets as Edgar Bowers, Michael Vince, Jim Powell, Robert Wells, and Gregory Woods.


But he was also a prose writer and critic of great distinction who wrote some of the most intelligent criticism of such gay poets as Whitman, Ginsberg, James Merrill and Robert Duncan.


Collected Poems and a collection of prose, Shelf Life, were published in 1994. Frontiers of Gossip appeared in 1998 and Boss Cupid in 2000.


Gunn died in his sleep at his home in San Francisco on April 15, 2004. He is survived by his companion of over 52 years, Mike Kitay.

Abu Nuwas, Islamic Poet of Male Love

Although in the modern world, the Islamic countries are known as those most hostile to male love, it was not always so.  In earlier times in the Moslem lands, famous Iranian and Arab poets such as Hafiz i-Shirazi and Abu Nuwas praised and rued the charms of boys (whom they plied with wine and seduced). Sufi holy men from India to Turkey sought to find Allah by gazing upon the beauty of beardless youths. Storytellers included gay love tales in the Thousand and One Nights. Artists like Riza i-Abbasi amused kings and princes with exquisitely wrought erotic Persian miniatures and calligraphies. Mullahs and censors railed against male love, but men of all walks of life, from Caliphs to porters, delighted in it and all looked forward to being attended by fresh-faced tellaks (masseurs) in the hamam, and “unaging ghilman (youths) as beautiful as pearls” in paradise.

Abu-Nuwas al-Hasan ben Hani Al-Hakami (756–814), (best known simply as Abū-Nuwās), was one of the greatest of classical Arabic poets, who also composed in Persian on occasion. Born in the city of Ahvaz, in Persia, where his father was from southern Arabia and his mother was Per­sian. His first teacher was the poet Waliba ibn al-Hubab (died 786), a master who initiated him into the joys of pederasty as well as poetry.

Originally trained in theology and grammar, he gained his great fame as a poet who excelled in lyrical love poetry, in lampoons and satire, and in "mujun" - frivolous and humorous descriptions of indecent or obscene matters. As with many other Islamic poets, he particularly celebrated in his poetry the love of wine - and boys. As one of the earliest Arab poets to write lyrical love poetry about boys, his achievement and influence  helped to bring the genre to great heights.

Abu Nuwas' poetry is characterised by an astonishing lack of inhibition and one of the most attractive features of his diwan is the extent to which his verse reveals its author's personality. What emerges is a likeable, if rather louche, character with an outrageous sense of humour, sharp wit, unaccompanied by malice, and considerable sensibility who let no convention save, on occasion, the order of the caliph, restrain him in his pursuit of life's sensual pleasures. In his khamriyyat, Abu Nuwas offers a glimpse of the hedonistic and dissipated world he inhabited: the world of Baghdad high society at the zenith of the Abbasid caliphate.

I die of love for him, perfect in every way,
Lost in the strains of wafting music.
My eyes are fixed upon his delightful body
And I do not wonder at his beauty.
His waist is a sapling, his face a moon,
And loveliness rolls off his rosy cheek
I die of love for you, but keep this secret:
The tie that binds us is an unbreakable rope.
How much time did your creation take, O angel?
So what! All I want is to sing your praises.


    (Love in Bloom; after Monteil, p. 95)

His preferred type of youth was the pale gazelle, whose face shone like the moon, with roses on his cheeks and ambergris in his long curly hair, with musk in his kisses and pearls between his lips, with firm boyish but­tocks, a slender and supple body, and a clear voice. Beardless boys held the great­est attraction - the growth of hair on the cheek was likened to that of apes - but here also Abu Nuwas flouted social norms by describing down on the cheek as erotically appealing, since it preserved beauty from indiscreet glances and gave a differ­ent flavor to kisses.

The only woman who played an important part in his life was Janan, a slave girl, but, because of his libertine conduct, she never trusted the sincerity of his love. When she asked him to renounce his love of boys, he refused, saying that he was one of the "people of Lot, " with reference to the Arab view that the Biblical Lot was the founder of homosexual love. Abu Nuwas was sexually interested in women or girls only when they looked like boys, but even then he considered their vagina too dan­gerous a gulf to cross. As he said (symboli­cally): "I have a pencil which stumbles if I use it on the front of the paper, but which takes great strides on the back." He also wrote about the pleasures of masturbation, which he saw as inferior to the love of boys - but preferable to marriage.

Although his fame rests on his erotic verse and flagrant disregard for religious rules, towards the end of his life he underwent a change of heart, and once again devoted himself to religious studies.

See also:

Abu Nuwas, the first and foremost Islamic gay poet (Gay Art History)

Abu Nuwas (c. 757- c. 814) (Encyclopedia of Homosexuality)