Since the troubadours, Western poetry has rarely spoken of love, desire and pleasure without invoking the spectre of death. Western discourse also marries representations of homoeroticism to catastrophe; an entire modern narrative sub genre, for instance, plots the untimely demise of a wayward homosexual protagonist, a narrative sometimes resuscitated in media discourse on AIDS. Merrill Cole argues that death, whether through complications resulting from a compromised immune system, or as the result of gaybashing, provides narrative satisfaction. This narrative not only informs the critical reception of Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane, but also the structure of T. S. Eliot's anti-narrative poem, The Waste Land . This book posits that male homoeroticism is a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of modernism and the crisis of modern masculine identity. Cole explores how homoerotic affect - instantiated in the works of Rimbaud, Crane and Eliot - contributes to queer theory, and shows what poetry has to offer critical inquiry.

This book aims to re-establish an interest in poetry by integrating question of prosody and aesthetics with political literary study. Cole used the.