Queer Tradition

One way to think about the ongoing interest and significance of Robert K. Martin’s book The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry is to recall its date of publication, 1979. This is only ten years after Stonewall; only six years after the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It is before Reagan; it is before AIDS. It is also before the language of crisis the epidemic taught us and before the politics of queerness it gave rise to. So it makes sense that the poetic “tradition” of Martin’s book is not so much “queer” as it is fraternal — a tradition of brother seeking brother in poetic time; a tradition of “hermeneutic friend[s],” as Allen Grossman called it.¹ Martin does not aim to establish the terrain of a gay textuality, as critics like Thomas Yingling and Lee Edelman later did, but to track the ways gay male poets cited each other, or cited Walt Whitman and Crane, to signal their membership in something like a lineage, specifically a lineage of imagining brotherhood as the trope and relationship that could redeem the American sins of violence and greed, and make space for gay men as true citizens while doing it.² This is more like a gay utopian tradition than a queerness.

Even so, I am interested in how those two words, queer and tradition, might speak to each other, and what Martin’s book can teach us about their relationship. In one sense, queer and tradition are entirely opposed: queerness is the very opposite of tradition, inasmuch as tradition involves the assembly of a single narrative of birth and development and serves the function of certifying forms of authenticity. This is tradition as Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson have analyzed it: hegemonic, univocal, all the more defensive for being based on historical wishes and half-truths.³

In literary history, though, you could say that “tradition” has always been caught up with a certain kind of queerness. Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence gets men very deep inside each other and recommends discerning just the right Lucretian “accent of deviation” for poets, who grow into families with ever-expanding numbers of parents the longer they read poetry.⁴ And in T. S. Eliot’s account of tradition, the ego of the poet dissolves and merges, at the moment of its insertion into tradition, with the work of all the other (indicatively male) poets, whose poems are then rewritten by the new arrival — inverting the relationship between past and present, and making the son the father.⁵ By incorporating these retrojections and prolepses into their accounts of tradition, Bloom and Eliot both fit quite well into what we’re currently calling “queer temporality”: a kind of time that is not linear or progressive. I don’t mean that it’s possible to do a queer reading of these accounts of tradition, though surely it is; I mean that, by at least one definition, these conservative, paternalist literary theories are themselves queer.

This says to me that our working understanding of queerness, at least in the academy, has ballooned into a formalist generality that has come unwittingly to resemble that which it claims to oppose. This is no one’s fault in particular, but it is one reason I’m so interested in a book like The Homosexual Tradition —not because it’s a more properly activist book but because it is not burdened with an obligation to imagine itself as activist. Martin had important practical work to do in his book, some of which is so straightforward, so basic, that it takes your breath away to think he had to do it. He had to establish that in some sense, the poets he was writing about — Whitman and Crane, most importantly — could indeed be thought of as gay poets, whether or not the authors themselves would have chafed at the designation. He had to establish that sexual identity was a legitimate feature of literary analysis, even if shorn of dignifying psychoanalytic language. And he had to establish that it was...