The lack is a striking one, but the subject received some overdue attention this year. Lee considers the sexual in Blake and Shelley as a political issue. For both poets, cultural tyranny is expressed in laws, taboos and artificial hierarchies which keep the sexes separate, and both poets, for Lee, offer a sexualized poetry which breaks those bonds. Brass's biographical explanations are a little weak, but the sexual in Keats is a topic worth reappraisal. Sexuality is also considered in a collection of essays edited by Richard C. Sha as part of Romantic Circles Praxis Series.
Taking as its basis David M. Halperin's point that Foucault never intended a discontinuity between sexual acts and sexual identities, sexuality is re-examined across a wide range of Romantic texts. Two in particular are relevant to this section. Literary relationships were considered from a less sexual perspective in Literary Couplings: Two chapters are of relevance to this section. Home at Grasmere concludes with the poet achieving the status of a solitary genius away from the domestic household, but Wallace does not argue for a neat gender divide.
Rather, both Dorothy and William combine authority and collectivity in their writing, suggestive, for Wallace, of the changing nature of the literary marketplace. Romantic writers continually oscillate in their opinions of Napoleon, Stock argues, because their response to him is primarily philosophical and aesthetic, not political.
The Wordsworth Circle continued its re-evaluation of the shaping texts of the Romantic critical tradition, with essays on E. This is a timely series of articles, showing a respect for these formidable forebears but also reflecting helpfully on the changes wrought in Romantic studies since their seminal publications and often, indeed, as a result of their publications.
The breadth of response and the serious and careful attention paid to the philosophical and poetic intricacies of Wordsworth's verse are a fitting tribute to the work of Hartman, a critic who has done so much to develop understandings of Romantic verse in general, and Wordsworth more than any other poet. I will turn now to those studies which have considered individual poets, beginning with Wordsworth.
There were no books exclusively on Wordsworth in , but he forms a significant part of two important studies. Wordsworth's inaction, particularly in his political life, has been the subject of some controversy in recent years, but for Stefanie Markovits in The Crisis of Action in Nineteenth-Century English Literature this inaction is a central part of the development of literature in the nineteenth century. Aristotle lies behind much of her argument, but Markovits is keen to point out that, where Aristotle places action at the centre of drama, writers in the nineteenth century tend, in revealing ways, towards feeling rather than plot.
In an elegantly argued chapter, Markovits reads The Borderers as expressive of Wordsworth's sense of guilt for his own inaction in France in the s. But her focus is ultimately much larger, and her historicization much richer, than this suggests. Markovits argues of The White Doe that the division between the active Francis and the wisely passive Emily represents the division between the early and late Wordsworths. Wordsworth moves from dramatic action towards society, social intercourse, and self-consciousness, paving the way for the novel.
Another book to feature Wordsworth has aims that extend not only beyond this section, but beyond English studies too. It has been a good year for religion and Romanticism, and in Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth , Lori Branch places Wordsworth as part of a long eighteenth-century history of spontaneity. Branch takes Wordsworth's religious thought seriously, arguing that his conception of spontaneity was moral before it was aesthetic. A Casebook , an instalment in the Oxford Casebooks in Criticism series, will prove a helpful guide for undergraduates approaching what is perhaps the most frequently discussed poem in Romantic studies.
Gill's excellent introduction displays a real reverence for the poem, but he combines this critical generosity with a clear-sighted scepticism about the process of canonization. Gill surveys the critical recovery of the many texts of The Prelude that has occurred over the last century, and clearly lays out the problems that this process of textual recovery and reconstitution has posed.
The publishing history of The Prelude , Gill argues, means that criticism pre, unable to compare the various texts, lacks a vital element. Gill's selection of essays reflects this perception, covering only the last fifty years. These come from a number of critical and theoretical perspectives, including essays by M. Abrams, Anne Mellor, Alan Liu and Susan Wolfson, and ably recreate the breadth of debate that has surrounded the poem.
As usual, The Prelude received a great deal of attention in Wordsworth studies this year. In a sensitive, well-argued piece, Yousef shows how Wordsworth accommodates, but moves beyond, the theories of Shaftesbury, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and others. The multiplicity of contexts that has marked Romantic studies as a whole has benefited Wordsworth as much as any poet in Hessell's excellent article contests the apparently normative opposition between poetry and journalism, reading Wordsworth's Preface as informed by the emergent debate over the respective roles of poetry and news.
While interesting, its applicability to Wordsworth's poetry is limited. Wordsworth's relationship with popular culture gains further attention in J. Wordsworth's relationship with literary figures both past and present was a frequent topic of debate in Rather, Cappeluti considers Auden's engagement with Romanticism, and with Wordsworth in particular, as a central point of negotiation in Auden's conception of audience.
The results are remarkably instructive, as Bruhn traces the function of mimesis in Wordsworth's extraordinary evocation of the ever-moving scene of urban life, as well as in his poetry more generally. Portraiture in the Romantic period was also considered this year by Christopher Rovee in Imagining the Gallery: Rovee takes as his topic the way in which portraits acted as contested areas of social and cultural identification in the Romantic period.
Rovee's topic lies outwith the bounds of this section and his work is considered fully in section 1 above, but it is worth drawing attention to his final chapter on Benjamin Robert Haydon's portrait of Wordsworth. Neglected parts of the Wordsworthian oeuvre received welcome attention in three of the best articles to appear on Romantic poetry this year. Work on Coleridge's poetry was rather limited this year, though Nicholas Reid's excellent Coleridge, Form and Symbol is an important addition. Reid takes Coleridge's critical thought as its primary focus, but he places Coleridgean metaphysics alongside his early poetry.
Reid argues that Coleridge's conception of form and symbol is a broadly consistent aspect of his post thought which continues to be of relevance to contemporary theory. His first section lays the ground for his claim that Coleridge's conception of form should be taken seriously, before moving on to consider the significance of this view in his poetry. Reid argues that the Ancient Mariner is a self-referential meditation on the symbolic. It is a critical move characteristic of the book. Reid is clearly aware of and influenced by contemporary critical theory, and indeed he is keen to show how an understanding of Coleridgean thought can aid that debate.
Yet his primary preoccupation is to elucidate the complexities of Coleridge's thinking. His arguments may not convince all, but this is a generous, thoughtful book, and of significant importance to students of Coleridge's poetry and philosophy. The Statesman's Manual , Fried argues, has for too long been considered as a rarefied, ahistorical text. Taking Coleridge's famous contrast between symbol and allegory seriously, Fried shows how this is a deeply political distinction, if one that bears the marks of Coleridge's later political philosophy.
The cumulative product of more than twenty years of research, Tsur takes seriously Coleridge's claim that his poetry functions beyond consciousness. But Tsur is clearly offering a quite different kind of book. What a pity that he could not have performed the same analysis with the voice of the greatest talker of the Romantic age, Coleridge himself. Also published this year was Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life by William Christie.
As part of Palgrave Macmillan's Literary Lives series, this book faces an unusual difficulty with Coleridge, in that its subject has already performed the task in his important, if importantly odd, Biographia Literaria. Christie clearly has a great admiration for Coleridge in general and the Biographia in particular, and this is a generous, careful exploration of his life and work. The nature of the series requires Christie to use the life to understand the work, but this balancing can become a little strained.
While supported by some recent scholarship, the readings Christie supplies lack the sophistication or depth of recent Coleridge studies. The account of the life, meanwhile, while well developed, will clearly not match the depth provided by Richard Holmes's two-volume biography. Animal Magnetism's importance to nineteenth-century literature has been well covered in recent years, but Eric G.
Aside from his philosophical interests, Coleridge's work was considered in other lights. The Coleridge Bulletin provided some important new work on Coleridge in Byron has been well served in books with more general aims published this year notably Wolfson's Borderlines and Hopps and Stabler's Romanticism and Religion , but he forms a major part of three others. The book is confidently argued and ambitious in its theoretical scope, mapping out a theory of genre with important applications to literary writing from Homer to Beckett.
There is an admirable clarity to Strathman's style, despite the complexity of the ideas he approaches. Strathman aims to chart a progress: Schlegel theorizes an aesthetics of the fragmentary that had been given expression earlier notably by Plato in the Dialogues , and by Sterne in Tristram Shandy , which is picked up on and developed first by Byron, then by Joyce, and reaches its apotheosis in the theory of Blanchot. The argument benefits from a close engagement with the grammar of the poem to produce a broadly persuasive if occasionally limited reading of Byron's brilliant, complex, and often profoundly unsettling use of language.
Lutz traces the development of these dangerous lovers back through the Gothic novels of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, and an important insight is the significance of Walter Scott's novels on the development of this eroticized trope. Much more could be said about this, pinpointing the ways in which Scott and Byron manipulate the sense of homelessness, history and the erotic the barely subdued homoeroticism and deliberate Byronism of Redgauntlet is an interesting avenue that Lutz bypasses. Lutz, indeed, moves a little too quickly between texts at times, sacrificing the development of a fuller, more convincing argument for the rattling pace of the narrative she tells.
This is a lively study, and it throws up a number of interesting parallels and suggestions that are worth following up. It is the breadth and theoretical ambition of this study which make it so compelling: Colligan focuses on print culture, the mechanisms and techniques which underpin the distribution of texts, a subject that is beginning to receive the attention it deserves in the Romantic period and in literary scholarship more broadly.
Colligan's study is cultural: Obscenity, she argues, like any other critical construction, is unstable and culturally contested. Reading Byron alongside Southey's attacks on him in the Quarterly Review , Colligan shows how the publications of these authors share a cultural space with obscenity, and that their published acknowledgement of obscenity's existence makes the cultural boundaries they seek to draw all the more difficult to maintain.
Of primary interest to Romanticists is her chapter on Byron, which reads his invocation of orientalist tropes as culturally bound up with a sensuality associated with obscene publications. As William St Clair and others have shown recently, Byron's audience became hugely diversified after Don Juan was pirated by radical publishers. The conservative backlash to his apparent obscenity, Colligan shows, is rooted in precisely this issue. Writers like Southey were afraid not of Byron, but of the effect he might have in the wrong labouring-class hands.
This is a study which will interest many Byronists, but it is also an important addition to studies of print culture. Peterfreund places the mnemonicist Feinaigle's New Art of Memory as an important context for Don Juan in which Byron's sense of the difficulty of descending to posterity is accommodated by becoming memorable in surprising ways. Parker takes seriously Southey's suggestion that Byron is of the Devil's party to read Byron through the lens of Satanic opposition.
Byron's femininity is also a concern for Joshua D. The Byron Journal produced a number of articles of interest this year. Gordon Potter focuses on Byron's deployment of specific images at the central points of his poems. Shears suggests that the poem's fragmentary nature holds out to the reader the possibility of ethical judgement of the poem's action which, because of its unfinished state, must always remain unfulfilled. Simon Bainbridge also looks at Byron's relationship with his readers, focusing on his devoted female reading audience.
Anne Fleming presented a new biography of Byron, Byron the Maker: Truth or Masquerade—An Exploration , the first volume of which Byron in England , covering his life from Aberdeen in to departure for the Continent in was published in This claimed, like most biographies of the poet, to present the true Byron, shorn of the biased calumny of earlier commentators.
It is a pleasant read, and incorporates a consistent focus on Byron's letters, journals and poetry. Fleming is quick to defend Byron from those who would question his moral integrity, but any thoroughgoing analysis of Byron's cultural importance or of the relationship between the life and work is thin on the ground. It is a generous biography by a writer with an evident passion for her subject, but not a book that is likely to have much influence on scholarly readers. The year was something of a bumper one for Shelley studies, and he has been an important part of this year's work, particularly in books by Mazzeo and Miller.
But after such an outpouring, it is unsurprising to find that there was somewhat less published in Timothy Morton edits The Cambridge Companion to Shelley , a useful introduction for undergraduates and graduates. The chapters here are notably strong, and contain work that stands in its own right as important criticism on Shelley. Chapters by William Keach on poetry and politics , Jeffrey Robinson on translation and Jerrold Hogle on language and linguistics stand out. Morton clearly favours the radical Shelley as opposed to the Arnoldian angel amongst these versions of the poet, and his introduction is lively and well informed.
Morton has himself been an important influence on Shelley studies, and his enthusiasm for his topic is more than apparent. His attempts to place Shelley as the hippest of the Romantics can become rather silly, unfortunately: All this is all the more unnecessary given that Shelley studies, as this collection ably demonstrates, is in a state of rude health, benefiting as well as any of the canonical six from the current direction of Romantic studies.
There were a number of other articles of note on Shelley, beyond those mentioned already in this section. While Greece remained a major focus for the philhellenic poet, Sachs argues that Rome provides a crucial function in the often deeply political structuring of Shelley's historical thought.
Patriotism in Shelley's writing is a welcome, and almost wholly ignored topic, but Matthew C. Representation, Hybridity, Ethics pp. The worm is, surprisingly, the animal Shelley referred to most in his poetry, and its lowly position in the animal kingdom allowed Shelley to reconsider the place of humanity in the chain of being. Susan Wolfson has offered one way of reading Keats's critical reception in Borderlines , and Sarah Wootton returns to the topic in Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature.
Wootton considers Keats through literary and artistic representations of images from his poems from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War. She makes an eloquent argument for the multiplication of critical Keatses. Beginning with Shelley's Adonais , Wootton shows how Keats became the object of posthumous consumption and regeneration.
In elegies of Keats by Browning and Shelley, Keats becomes at first diminished, and later wholly obliterated. With female poets like Rossetti and Barrett Browning, however, Keats's voice is not simply subsumed into that of the elegist, but is recuperated and celebrated. In a series of excellent readings of paintings of scenes from Keats's poems by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and others, Wootton shows how word and image combine to produce distinct versions of Keats. In a discussion of John Melhuish Strudwick's Isabella , Wootton argues that Keats's sensuality had become a commercial speculation.
Rather than a productive relationship with Keats's work, High Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painting produces a parasitic, repetitive regression. The central figure in the book is Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The book is also marred by an unfortunately high density of typographical errors, but this is a fine addition not only to Keats studies, but to studies of poetic influence more broadly.
This was the only book on Keats this year, but he was well served by a number of articles. Keats's poetics and his literary relationships have not slipped wholly from critical view, however. John Clare's The Shepherd's Calendar was presented in an elegant edition by Tim Chilcott, which usefully places manuscript and published versions in a parallel text. Clare also made an appearance in six articles of note. Clare's late poetry, a focus of Margaret Russett's work this year, is further considered by Jason N.
Goldsmith's fine article places Clare's sexual punning as a response to a rising celebrity culture dominated by Byron. Suarez, SJ, and Sarah M. Given the allusion, Rivers suggests, locals were clearly under the impression that Harriet had recourse to prostitution.
Elsewhere in Romantic Textualities: The year's work in this category was particularly interested in engaging with the national and transnational concerns of the poets, and an excellent essay by Anne Mellor serves as a good introduction to some of the major themes addressed in the critical work in this field. There is an important discussion of Felicia Hemans in Susan J. Wolfson's major work Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism , discussed at length in the section 1 above. Hemans's The Siege of Valencia was the subject of three essays this year, all of which are also further discussed in section 5 below.
Through a comparison of the three plays in which Hemans's addition of the character Ximena to the borrowed plot is highlighted, Lopez complicates earlier readings of The Siege of Valencia to argue that Hemans simultaneously presents a woman's resistance to masculine codes of nationalism and her ability to subscribe ardently to them. For an already hybridized people, sacrificing maternal feeling to secure the myth of racial purity and national identity and pride becomes a crucial tactic of war.
The first essay traces some of the recent developments in scholarly editions of Hemans's poems and her inclusion in anthologies which facilitate teaching. In the second essay Wolfson begins by sharing some of her own experiences of teaching Hemans and the success she has had with undergraduates in reading Hemans after Byron. In this article Osman focuses on the Byronic heroines in Hemans's orientalist poems and argues persuasively that through the plight of these figures who take their destinies into their own hands, the morality of military action is questioned while a sense of commonality is established which transcends racial difference among women in their suffering at the hands of patriarchy.
Lootens argues that studies on Hemans should stop privatizing the poet and should instead expand the field of enquiry to cover the ways in which Hemans's writings interact with the Victorians and their idea of national identity and to ask whether she can, within the current climate, continue to be associated with American patriotism.
In a series of excellent readings of Hemans's poems, Rudy demonstrates that her poetry is a vital contribution to discourses of expression and restraint in this period and that the act of restraining emotion is frequently carried out through her poetic form. Two excellent, and related, contributions by Emma Mason round off this year's work on Hemans: Modalities of Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature , pp.
In the first essay, Mason explores T. Eliot's exclusion of women poets in general, and Hemans in particular, in his prose, explaining that, for Eliot, feeling is made noble and saved from common sentimentality only through rational thought. It is this balance between thinking and feeling which he believed women poets failed to achieve.
As an example of this, Bishop's Casabianca serves to show how the emotions which Hemans evokes in her poetry are long-lasting, and transcend subjective readings which seek political or nationalistic agendas. In an engaging study of the poet, Mason considers the ways in which Hemans's contemporaries responded to her writings on various themes, which make up subject headings in the chapter: Letitia Landon was the subject of two articles.
Most notably, a new edition of Landon's The Golden Violet , plus memoirs on her life, appeared as volume 5 of Routledge's collection Women and Romanticism, — , edited by Roxanne Eberle. This collection is discussed in section 1 above. Mary Robinson also received much critical attention this year. These gamblers, many of whom Robinson knew personally, took offence at what appeared to be yet another public attack.
This articulate and well-informed essay compares the language of the crim con pamphlets to that of Robinson's writings to show how Robinson responded to her public representations of her in a nuanced way. However, despite their new freedom, these women do not stray far from these traditional roles. Robinson is further discussed in Jeffrey C. Next, two essays on Hannah More: The first essay reconsiders More's intent in her Cheap Repository Tracts which, Webb argues, have been read as genuine survival guides for the poor but, upon closer consideration, actually reveal a more critical and subversive agenda.
Focusing on The Way to Plenty and The Cottage Cook , Webb provides an interesting social history of scarcity tracts in order to highlight the particular tone of More's texts. Smith's essay begins with a general discussion on the difficulties of attributing poems found in manuscript books to specific authors.
In this case, the manuscript books in question belonged to Anne Blandford. One of these commonplace books is anonymous and Smith offers a convincing argument in favour of it also belonging to Blandford before explaining the relationship between Blandford and More. A bio-critical reading of More's published poems and the recently discovered unpublished poems sheds further light on More's career as a poet. Through examples from three poems, On Mrs Montagu [], Narrative [] and A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade [], Carnie argues that Yearsley demonstrates a complicated ambivalence towards class that should not be simplified.
Translating, Reviewing, Rewriting , pp. Manini argues that Smith distances herself from Petrarch and Milton in that death, a male personification, is the only means of escape. Smith's sonnets are also the subject of a chapter in Christopher Rovee, Imagining the Gallery , discussed in section 1 above. There are two essays on Anna Seward in this category: The first essay discusses Seward's love of Handel and William Cowper's voice of dissent in response to the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey in the same year as Seward's popular Louisa: Wood considers the possible reasons for Seward's impassioned and arguably disproportionate response and suggests that Seward saw Handel as a cultural model out of which a unified national culture could emerge.
This essay provides a detailed and insightful comparison of these three texts. Chakravarti also addresses the ways in which Tighe sought to counterbalance possible charges of impropriety. Joanna Baillie and Anna Barbauld continue to attract much critical attention in this category. An awareness of the psychological struggle to reach a balance between a moralizing sympathy and a craving for excitement and voyeurism led Baillie to the Gothic as a means by which to explore this relationship between duty and pleasure.
She explains that because Baillie was such a methodical thinker, she would naturally wish to enter into a debate which, at its root, questioned the individual's ability to interpret his own religion. For Elizabeth Inchbald, Tucker argues, mimesis on the stage was a source of pleasure for the audience because sympathy with the play's characters required a sense of familiarity and kinship. For a review of this and other works on Baillie's plays, see section 5 below. This, Rohrbach argues, enables readers to distance themselves from present events. This makes a critique of present events possible because, unlike events in the fixed past, the future is not a given, making positive change seem possible and therefore worth striving for.
This essay outlines the historical context in which Barbauld wrote to show that while the subject of the poem was uncontroversial, the implied connection between England and France as imperial aggressors disrupted the popular association between South America and Napoleon-wary England. Barbauld and Aikin believed that the instruction of children had a direct effect on the nation and they strove to inculcate in their readers new models of masculinity which stressed the important role of fathers in family life.
In so doing, they suggested that wars abroad had a direct impact on the happiness of domestic family life. Levy makes clear her position that Barbauld and Aikins were not pacifists and understood the necessity of self-defence but that they wished to instil in children the critical skills with which to question the legitimacy of each call for military action. As a woman, I want no country. Probably the most substantial publication on Blake in , certainly in terms of volume but also the range of materials and scholarship that it presents for researchers into Blake, was Marsha Keith Schuchard's Why Mrs Blake Cried: Keith Schuchard's work on the Moravian background of Blake's mother, Catherine who was married to Thomas Armitage before she married James Blake, the artist's father has already contributed greatly to Blake studies, and this extended text provides a detailed study of Blake's engagement in the esoteric world of the eighteenth century.
What is less convincing is the evidence that Blake moved from a general understanding of some rituals to specific practices of the type outlined in parts of the book—or, indeed how truly detailed his knowledge was of such things as Tantra. A similar problem arose with Sheila Spector's marvellous two-volume study of Blake and kabbalism, Wonders Divine [] and Glorious Incomprehensible []. Blake certainly knew of kabbalism, but the amount of time he devoted to its study was almost certainly less than that given by Madonna, even if the results were considerably richer for British art and literature.
Where Schuchard's book excels—and what marks it out from the often more impressionistic texts of Hirst and Raine—is in terms of the historical context for this fascinating and half-submerged occult world of the late eighteenth century, as well as the marvellous details of the Armitage family that make this essential reading for anyone interested in Blake. The relation between Blake's ideas and those of Moravians such as Count Zinzendorf have recently begun, rightly, to attract a great deal of attention, and the view that emerges is of a humane and ecumenical spirituality that would have appealed to Blake, as well as an emphasis on sexuality that clearly could be one of the various influences in his prophetic books.
What is less convincing is the sometimes too-easy transition to Hindu and other Eastern traditions about a third of the way into Why Mrs Blake Cried. To the Moravians, there has always undoubtedly been a recognition of fundamental sympathies between religions beyond simple monotheism; but while this is to their and Blake's credit, Western understanding of such things as Tantra in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was superficial at best.
Blake was interested in the East—and in more than the orientalizing fashion that rendered it fashionably other; some claims made by Keith Schuchard, however, appear difficult to substantiate. Nonetheless, this remains an important book and one that will have a much longer and more widely deserved impact than E. Thompson's theory regarding Blake's Muggletonian connections. Blake has been one of the most influential writers and artists in British history; until recently, however, full-length studies of the reception of his work were rare.
Edward Larrissy's Blake and Modern Literature is the first comprehensive review of Blake's influence on literary writers from the late nineteenth century onwards, with the occasional foray into popular culture, such as Michael Dibdin's novel, Dark Spectre. The dominant figure in the opening four chapters is Yeats—partly reflecting Larrissy's own previous critical interests and also a recognition of the importance of Yeats's work in bringing Blake to a wider audience through the collection he edited with Edwin Ellis.
Much of this material is fairly familiar, and it is when Larrissy turns to other writers, such as Auden, Joyce, David Jones and Eliot that Blake and Modern Literature becomes more illuminating. The section on T. The second part of the book deals with texts from the later part of the twentieth century, beginning with an essay on postmodernity that develops some themes from the introductory chapter regarding literary reception more generally and Blake in particular. Did I go out on dates with guys my own age, and did I have sex with them, etc.
So I agreed to love lessons. She had her school bag with her, which I had never seen before, and she directed me to stand up. I looked at her, perplexed, because I was already standing. I climbed up and placed one palm on the wall, and each foot on an opposite side of the plastic seat. I watched curiously as she shuffled through her bag for God knows what, then watched her pull out the biggest fucking carrot I had ever seen.
Slipped her hand up under my kilt and ran her firm fingers across the silky material of my underwear. My nipples went hard beneath my cardigan, my blouse, my white cotton bra. And I breathed heavy breaths that made me feel full and present. My underwear clung pointlessly around my knees, just above my tall, woolen socks. I pulled her face in even closer, harder, from the other side of the coarse fabric. I hunched down to avoid detection.
And eventually, after the girls left our sacred hideaway, Sunny fucked me with the colossal vegetable. Oh, I mean, she prepared me for sex with guys, see. I came out as queer years later when I moved to Toronto to study social work. I used to lock myself in that bathroom stall and remember her, between classes. I think of her sometimes. She had talked about running away to Toronto, the closest urban center, and she had wanted me to come with her.
Interestingly, satire was the most commonly prosecuted form, even when satirists did not directly copy their victims. I felt like one of those geese French peasant women wearing polka-dot head kerchiefs force-feed, so the geese can get all nice and fat and their enlarged livers can be used for pate, which is a delicacy. Haiku Harbor, Collection 1. They saw Christ as having set the example, done us all a big favor. Reid takes Coleridge's critical thought as its primary focus, but he places Coleridgean metaphysics alongside his early poetry. One of the most stimulating books in was Susan Wolfson's Borderlines:
But I could always think of reasons not to go. I like to imagine her here in the big city, maybe not so far away from me, out and proud, and fucking women without the unnecessary guise of training them. But sometimes I wonder if she was one of the casualties, one of the kids who wound up on the streets and got swallowed, like so many small-town escapees. For the most part now, I live in the present. I soar up to that mural of Jesus, stretching my full-grown body across his image, my breasts pressed hard against his chest.
I touch his cheek, slowly, carefully, trace the lines of his features; run my fingers along the thorns of his crown. I am so gentle. There is no space between us; our bodies meld together, soft breaths bouncing back against the flatness of his face. This is the moment I have dreamed of for a lifetime.
The details are overwhelming: Even his expression seems different: Everything is dark and close and blended. In the backdrop of caliginous sky I see the souls of little beings who once walked the earth, but who now fly with God. I press my lips hard against the mouth of Christ, staining his perfect skin with the red of my lipstick.
My hand evanesces beneath my clothes, and my underwear descend willingly, effortlessly to my knees, and stay taut there. My legs are spread; my thighs wet with the warm overflow of my desire. My body is mine to touch, and it is cleansed and purged and beaming—my fingers twitching, rubbing beneath my layers of beautiful gown.
I moan in exaltation. I am ready to receive him, if only he would say the word. My eyes, my mouth, my heart, my cunt—everything open. It was just that, on some level, church was a big, BIG room you walked into, and you looked around for a nice or safe person to talk to. Its name was God.
You crossed yourself to appease him when you entered, and genuflected at the pew to humble yourself again just for good measure. And then there was this quiet lady with a kindly face over in the corner, a big bank of candles in front of her. Infantile, I toddled toward my mother.
The church was always that kind of refuge to me: The Eucharist was like a cookie. People talked about God as mighty and good and loving. But if he was, why did they have to keep reiterating it? Besides, from what I read in the Bible he seemed to be somebody prone to violence, punishment, and tests. I liked hugs and smiles, candlelight and quiet. Perhaps then, it was all because of my mother who was kind and a closeted Marian heretic herself.
They saw Christ as having set the example, done us all a big favor. They always claimed how loving he was, but when things got desperate they always turned to her, not him. During Mass, with its Old Testament first reading, we weekly received the message that God was an ornery, old grandpa, dyspeptic and cranky. This was supposedly fatherly, but I never saw him as a father, and would have run away if he was mine. My Dad was nice, a sort of comic jokester kind of guy who never hit us. I thought him a piss-ant. Besides, he was doomed, a tragic figure, and a willing one at that.
God living out his dreams through his son, like half the Dads with kids in Little League. I even felt a little sorry for Jesus. He was like one of those brilliant-colored Swallowtail butterflies, pinned literally on velvet: He never stood a chance. And I never really believed he was around; never prayed to him.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. He was a no-show is what he was. Mary, she was accessible, and well, a mother—I knew what that was as I had one. They were like superheroes, something for the imagination. Mary, being a mom, was real. She had to deal with you, and would. An intercessor, she would deliver your prayers. All the saints could do this of course, but only for specific things: Anthony for lost objects, for instance; St. Francis for wounded squirrels and birds; St Jude, when you felt especially desperate.
Mary, she was like the queen of the chess board, and those saints were just pawns, or rooks or bishops at best, restricted by their various specialties. No such limitations were set on Mary. It was as if she had that doomsday phone they say Nixon had where he could call straight through to Brezhnev in case of nuclear I Was Always a Marian Heretic 51 war. Mary could barge right into a private meeting God was having with the devil or whomever. She was the connection to have.
And what was God? The boss, the principal, the chief of police. God really was the King of the chessboard, silently waiting for Checkmate, while Mary rushed about winning the game. So Mary handled it for me. I knew I could tell her I was queer when it dawned on me as a boy. She might even help me get rid of it. So I addressed my prayers in her direction. And Mary developed quite a track record between my own requests and those of my mother, who petitioned her often in my presence. She was always on call and amazingly attentive.
She continually came through for me in myriad ways: I prayed that I would not be insulted, bullied, beaten—at least not too much. I sealed it with the sign of the cross, and kept a rosary under my pillow, along with the occasional lost tooth, my scapular, and my shiniest, JFK fifty-cent piece. And I felt invincible. Maybe it worked because I asked for small things. Which made her all the more special on some level.
What was a Catholic girl to do? Priests were intercessors as well. And she found one. They were more like agents, lawyers, advocates—homies? She would go to God for you. She was a lawyer, like all the priests and saints were lawyers. A good lawyer is always better than a good judge, and Mary knew the laws of the human heart, better even than God himself did. She was an expert witness. Without missing a beat, she answered: My mother was a devotee of the rosary, and along with the Blessed Mother, she was into the Holy Spirit more than she was ever into Jesus or God.
I never got the Holy Spirit myself. He sounded sneaky and hard to pin down, being invisible and all. My mother was sort of psychic, seeing lights and having strange supernormal encounters. She was always getting messages: But he never talked to me. It was a spiritual candy store in many ways. I had my book of saints with my favorites—the cute ones: Martin de Porres, St.
Sebastian, the several young, Italian boys with stigmata. But I never really prayed to them for whatever reason. Probably because Mary trumped them, and she worked—and, of course, she was a mom. Cute boys were narcissists, even if they were saints. Mary was sweet and seemed to take an interest in my welfare I had hard evidence: She was my true and erstwhile friend, just like my real-life Mom.
When I explicitly realized I was queer at eleven a combination of the locker room at The Washington Athletic Club and that nearly nude poster of Burt Reynolds that was circulating in , I asked Mary to please put a stop to it. I checked up on her progress too—or rather, was alerted to her negligence—as I found myself still gazing I Was Always a Marian Heretic 53 longingly at boys and their various parts: Down at the lake—oh my god, how their nipples indicted me and sent me spiraling into gut-sinking, tragic hopelessness.
They never teased me. But Mary got a pass. We were all Marian heretics I think. Like I say, a long line of them. I took a rosary to school. Kids would ask me what it was, or tell me they knew. Some would defensively throw out: I was the real deal, and they were cheap knockoffs. Imagine my surprise when I began to meet readers of Chick publications, which claimed that Catholics were worshippers of Baal, and that the Holy Father, Pope Paul, was the devil incarnate.
But they never actually had a bad word for her in all their Catholic bashing. After that, it was St. Jude, or find another means. I learned the Memorary: But I still found myself staring at boys—at their arms and legs, their chins, their brows; imagining them naked. The dread was never hell in the afterlife, but some version of it in the here and now. The dread was loneliness and the shame of social failure. David Rubin did however. I prayed to be straight, looking into the naves where she played second fiddle to the men.
But that was something I could rectify as I figured I could always adopt. Selfish was something I could handle, but what came out of the mouths of my father and brothers I could not, as they laughed, mocked, and carried on, all agreeing that faggots were sick, disgusting and should be killed. At Mass, Paul railed about abominations I hated him ; the Old Testament God ranted about impurities and disobedience blah, blah, blah ; Jesus ignored me and droned on with his parables about mustard seeds and thieves in the night.
It all seemed more and more irrelevant. I mean, I was a good kid; I got the gospels; I was good with the golden rule. Follow him where—to the subway? So I prayed to Mary, my heart a mess, weeping its way toward my divine mother, longing toward my classmates—and during Mass at our parish, Sacred Heart, toward the altar boys. Since my father had been beaten as a youth in parochial school by Jesuits, he gave us a pass on both Catholic school and being altar boys. We were public school crossing guards instead. I loved them as I loved all Catholic boys.
I thought Catholic boys were special like I thought the Catholic Church was special. After all, I and my Catholic crush boys were ancient. To be part of an ancient tradition was a kind of succor. It gave me an odd kind of hope, like maybe I could make it through somehow. The balm of longevity. I suppose I began to hide in it, like people have always hidden away in the folds of tradition—in the mantle of Our Lady even, I cowered.
So, while other boys grew proud of their looks, athletic abilities, or maybe the sudden girth and length of their dicks, I reached for whatever I could to bolster my flagging little ego. I was on no team; I chased no girls; I had no posse; according to Dr. Rubin, my dick was some sort of rotten meat. But I had a glorious Roman history. I was of the One True Faith. My mother told me so. It was self-evident, besides, as the Catholic Churches were always the oldest and prettiest in town.
They had more stained glass, special holy waters and oils, and cool gothic wood-carved confessionals. Even in history class at the public schools, we learned that most of the important buildings of the past were Catholic cathedrals—Chartres, St. I was an elitist, a nationalist, a tribalist. I fetishized the glory I was heir to, reveled in it. And to think, my poor Protestant friends had to drink grape juice and eat Wonder bread, while I sipped wine and worked the Holy Eucharist off the roof of my mouth.
I worshipped in big cathedrals with an organ soundtrack by Bach, surrounded by stained glass, statues, and incense, while they sang lame hymns in whitewashed rec. Our priests wore robes while their ministers wore suits and looked like car salesmen. Which was like leaving your mom on the porch. How could the Protestants expel her? Imagine a religion with no mom. How could a church not have a mom?
The One True Faith. And though I may have been off about the results, I was on the right page with my focus on sexuality. This is my body, the wafting incense, the tortured expiring young male in a loin cloth upfront on the cross, forever playing out the divine orgasm of death. But I never went so far as to consider the priesthood. On top of that, I thought their sermons embarrassingly apologist and contemporary, cheesy—or like bad, English essays.
It made me sick. But I did consider becoming a monk. Our parish, Sacred Heart, looked like the Ritz-Carlton compared to the humble manger Jesus was born in. But that was for the glory of God. Protestants just had no sense of glory or grandeur. And besides, we Catholics were allowed grand churches because we were often poorer than our Protestant neighbors—which just proved how good we must be. Our reward was in Heaven, while Protestants took their reward here in this world. Well, good luck at the Pearly Gates!
My mother told me all hardship and suffering was a gift that brought us closer to God. Worked for me, I felt chock full of such gifts. We used to give him rides to C. Thus Eduardo had the mystique of a near saint. He also had a divine face and angelic smile, divine arms, a divine little waist, and the sexiest brilliant white, bleached, oxford shirts to match his shimmering white teeth and the whites of his I Was Always a Marian Heretic 57 eyes—all of it complementing his dark, Indian complexion.
I wanted to see him naked as the host. Like a thief in the night. And oh, how Eduardo filled my dreams. But the things me and Eduardo did in my dreams were clearly not going to lead to beatification I was yet to learn of the ecstasy of St. Theresa , even if they meted out enough suffering for my waking hours to guarantee me a pass right through Purgatory and on into Heaven on the fast track. Or maybe that made it more of one? I was mad at her, but I guess I was growing up. I mean, poor Mary, she lost her son. She must have pleaded, but to no avail. In the end, God was mean and stubborn.
She lost her son; I was a fag. So I embraced tragedy. I took an interest in martyrs. Because they were handsome and Catholic and Irish. Well then, I wanted to be president. To hell with the priesthood or monkdom. I wanted to be loved and missed and mythified—and assassinated! That would make up for my shameful, sexual failure. JFK was a saint, and maybe I could be too. He was a man, not a wandering boy hippy who knocked on doors and bothered people with lectures.
I wanted to be him, and I felt blest to have been born under his reign, in A prince and heir. But who would be the first lady? I sank like a stone. I hung up my cleats, or my scapular as the case may be. I entered high school, I read Jack Kerouac yes, because he was Catholic and ruined just like me , and I drank. Catholic to the bitter end. I only attended Mass when my mother made me. I turned to art, the last stand of religious thought in the modern mind. I wrote my first poem—about Mary actually—and sent it to the New Yorker, and got my first rejection slip. I spent a lot of time backpacking in the High Sierra, and I got into yoga and Zen.
I imagined she was speaking to me. I thought it kind of sweet. I really missed her. She became Gaia I suppose. Of course the earth is my mother. The universe was a big, BIG room and the earth seemed sweet, a refuge. Nowadays, when I go home for the holidays, I never go to Mass. And it suits her fine. This one is your priest. There are many altars, from my desk I Was Always a Marian Heretic 59 to each bookshelf, to the windowsill, and atop the computer.
The whole room is piled with books like offerings: They lean against one another and shine, swell and put forth color and imagery, like a great, ramshackle pantheon of saints. There is, as well, a candle of the Miraculous Virgin, rays of light blasting from her palms, and Guadalupes galore. I light these candles whenever I feel powerless or want to make a good wish for something: Even the Buddha on my meditation altar is her.
And I was right about Eduardo. Every relationship is a rosary, with joyful mysteries, sorrowful mysteries, luminous mysteries, glorious mysteries. Is there anything sweeter than washing his feet? Love is a continual flow of sacraments. Coming out is a sacrament. My spiritual matriculation has been queer from the start and remains so. Hail Mary, Full of Grace, Blessed art thou.
God, how old was I? Leafing through that book, was I even then admiring the bearded men in robes, the savior with long hippie-hair? The savior in a loincloth, stretched out and nailed down, the muscles of his chest and arms swelling, his hair falling down around his bare shoulders. Did the illustrator bother to give him chest hair, belly hair, nipples? Did the child I was think about how the savior tasted and smelled? Did I want both to wield the nails and also kiss his bleeding feet and comfort him? My sadomasochism might not have consciously kicked in by that age, but I know I was an occult enthusiast by then.
These interests, needless to say, made me a complete freak in Hinton, West Virginia, my hometown of 3, The Baptists were especially nasty and judgmental, and I responded to them with unconcealed hatred still do. Unlike the Baptists, with their pompous, sanctimonious high-school Bible Club and their revivals, their pamphlets, and their church camps, the Catholics I knew never pushed or proselytized.
Catholic observances reminded me of the incense, robes, altars, and chalices of witchcraft and ceremonial magic. The drinking of transubstantiated blood reminded me of how much I relished Dark Shadows and Dracula movies. Jesus, on the other hand, was the latest in a long line of sacrificed gods, in the tradition of Tammuz and other Green Man vegetation deities who spring to life with forest greenery and garden grains in the spring, reach maturity and fullness in the summer, and are sacrificed beneath scythe and frost in the fall. I felt somewhat at home in Catholic churches when I translated their icons into pagan equivalents, glimpsing the old Gods beneath the Christian facade.
Now the Baptists despised me even more. Other than spending time with my lesbian buddies, I kept to myself, escaped into ancient Greece through the queer-friendly historical novels of Mary Renault, and dreamed of the day I would graduate from high school and get the hell out of Hinton.
Binding the God 63 But the most inconvenient facet of my identity had yet to surface— or, rather, I had yet to acknowledge it. By the seventh grade, I was jacking off, and the images that aroused me the most involved beautiful men struggling in restraint, strong men forced to submit and to suffer. There were the comic-book images of my favorite heroes— Batman, Tarzan, the Flash—tied up by villains. There were the stubble-rough cowboys on TV always getting overpowered or outnumbered or knocked out, only to end up bound and gagged, doing a lot of sweating and struggling in their bonds and making a lot of muffled noise.
There were, ubiquitous in southern West Virginia, those Christian images of the crucifixion and the events leading up to it: Why did these perverse images carry so much erotic power? Nevertheless, despite my confusion, by the time I was in high school, I was, in fantasy, vigorously wrestling down and tying up a few of the younger, handsomer substitute teachers.
My bearded buddy Mike, only a year older than I but already possessing the muscles and body hair of a man, inspired fantasies in which I would strip him to the waist, chain him to the wall of a garage, and gag him with a dirty cloth. I would beat him till he bled, till his body was wracked with sobs. The blood tasted good licked from his broad back.
I was, after all, not only a Wiccan but a vampire aficionado. Other times—already a Voracious Versatile, as I jokingly call myself these days—I would take off my shirt, tie my feet together with laundry cord, wrap the cord around my chest, and imagine being the powerful, heroic prisoner of some dangerous Western robber.
Such desires had no context. They were shameful, twisted, not to be shared. Sometimes, seeing the way that bondage was portrayed in movies and television shows—always in scenes of nonconsensual violence—I feared that my aroused response to these scenes was proof that I was on my way to becoming a crazy kidnapper or a psycho killer.
Despite my guilty confusion, however, I sensed in these fantasies an almost spiritual power, a religious mystery. Both were big, masculine guys, the kind I wanted to be, the kind I wanted to love. There was no desire to hurt Armando, nor pleasure in it. He was the flaming angel. Reading that book, relating to Danny and Armando, getting my first glimpse of the leather community—where bondage and suffering involved not madness and crime but mutuality, love, and passion—so many disparate pieces came together for me on a deep, unspoken level.
Christian images of restraint, torture, suffering, endurance, redemption. The relationship between the spiritual and the erotic, a connection most people I knew would find sacrilegious. Years later, I would guiltily rent it and get hard seeing a young Binding the God 65 Al Pacino, in a maddeningly brief scene, naked and hog-tied.
It was the summer of , just before I started graduate school in English at WVU, that a handsome, flirtatious, red-moustached bartender named Steve finally gave me a chance to experience firsthand sex that felt sacred. Steve inspired in the lonely, horny, passionate boy I was a crazy, violent, devouring reverence. I wanted to bind him, gag him, suck him, fuck him.
I wanted to eat him, drink him, incorporate him, make him a part of me. Like an Aztec priest, I wanted to hold his heart in my hands.
For a few weeks, before he moved on to greener pastures, Steve wanted me too. One evening I rode home with him. He lit tiny votive candles around the room. He pulled off his clothes in that flickering shrine, that stuffy bedroom down West Virginia Avenue. Oh yes, he was my Christ in the Candlelight. I tied his hands behind his back with a belt and knotted a dark blue bandana between his teeth. I sucked his big cock, chewed his hard nipples, reddened his ass with my palm, ate his smooth, perfect butt—white as a communion wafer—and I fucked him for a long time.
Here was the Muse, the God, the Savior, manifested in this beautiful nakedness snoring softly by my side. Theophany had become not intellectual abstraction but physical and emotional experience. My heart swelled with gratitude as I rose to quietly snuff the candles out. Robert Graves differentiates clearly between the human embodiment of the Muse—often fickle and inaccessible—and the spirit of the Muse herself. I was to learn that the hard way, as Steve moved on to other men and then out of town. I mourned as only a passionate, despairing young poet can, but I was to find that Muse manifested in another man soon enough.
In graduate school, I fell in love with Paul, who slept with me once and led me on for years. I read metaphysical poetry that effortlessly mingled the sexual and the sacred and called on Christ as the Divine Lover. Aching for Steve and later for Paul, I sat in Catholic churches staring at the beautiful bearded man suffering on the cross.
I lit candles and whispered prayers that the God might return again and offer himself to me as a willing sacrifice. Though Christian concepts of sin and salvation were not ones to which I subscribed, I could certainly grasp how suffering and endurance might serve as paths toward spiritual and emotional maturity, and I knew even then that, if I were in need of redemption, my devotion to beauty—human, natural, and artistic—would be what would save me. Graves hypothesizes that two powers, the God of Light—the Oak King, ruler of the Waxing Year—and the God of Darkness—the Holly King, ruler of the Waning Year—fight for the favors of the Goddess, a poetic mythology that has been since adapted by many Wiccan groups to celebrate the changing of the seasons.
Light falls to darkness on the Summer Solstice, dark falls to light on the Winter Solstice, much like the Zoro- Binding the God 67 astrian battle between light and dark that influenced early Christianity. Rival males fighting for a female was all too heterosexual for me, of course, but seeing those opposing gods as locked in a brotherly, loving struggle, that was another matter.
As if Jesus and Satan were each to strip to the waist and wrestle away, till one overcame the other, bound him, and took his sweaty pleasure on top. Graves gave me, in addition to this seasonal dualism, a crucial paragraph that summarized all my perverse fascinations with bondage, devouring, vampirism, sacrifice, and crucifixion. Surely, in my adolescent first experience of Graves, I read this paragraph. Who knows how it might have, on some unconscious level, prepared me for my obsessions to come?
Finally I had a spiritual framework—reconciling, in my mind at least, Christian and pagan imagery—in which to comprehend sadomasochism. As a priest presiding over sacrifice, I had a true vocation. After graduate school, it was time for me to take my turn as the suffering god. It took only one play session for him to admit that he preferred the dominant role to the submissive. When next Jim and I met, I was the Christos, naked, anointed with my own sweat, hands bound behind me, bandana knotted between my teeth, grunting and helpless as Jim propped my calves on his shoulders, put clothespins on my nipples, and gently pushed his condomed cock up my ass.
Now I was the holy one, I was the one beautiful and desired. Now I knew how they felt, the heroic, handsome ones, the demigods and warriors whose fates led them to helplessness, to suffering, to crucifixion and penetration.
My role was not that of active worshipper but passive sacrifice, the god of the fallen stag, the scythed wheat, the crushed grape, Christ nailed gasping to the cross, Odin hung moaning on the World Tree. II Now I know what I am about. I am a collector of holy images, a participant in rituals of submission and surrender.
It begins as experimental Sex Magick, invoking gods to descend into flesh, to wrestle and love through us. We drink wine, light candles, strip in the midsummer heat, press our young, hairy torsos together. I tie him spread-eagle to the bed, blindfold him, and buckle a cock-gag in his mouth. Then I sit back, sip Rhine wine, and study his struggle. He groans, tugs at his ropes, then falls back into acquiescent silence. Slowly, his cock grows hard, aroused by his own helplessness.
He looks like Christ stretched out and crucified. This love is meant to be, I know. This love will save me. I do not know that, by the Autumn Equinox, he and his lover will leave town. I do not know that, in statues and paintings—the Stations of the Cross, the captive Christ bound, whipped, or nailed to his agonizing death, St. All I know is that a love as deep and reckless as this is bound to wrap my heart in thorns. The Book of Colors. The Revelation of The Spirit of Love. Will I still go to Heaven? All Will Be Well. The Ultimate truth about Everything.
Space Contact in Santa Barbara. Silence in the City. Two Stories of Kings. Writings of Thomas Kelly Annotated. PrayerStarters in Times of Sadness or Depression. Little Wave and Old Swell. Matthew and the Magical Star. Poems for Everyone Except George. Cry of the Hopeless. Haiku Harbor, Collection 1. The Importance of Commemoration - Spiritual Happiness. Light in the Shoe Shop. Meditative Novena to Saint Gerard Majella.