Rhetoric and Sexuality

Rhetoric and Sexuality explores the poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill. Nickowitz combines a rhetorical and thematic interpretation, employing close readings and the critical lens of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis, to illustrate an additional way to read American poetry. He argues that the extent to which homosexual desire is problematic for these poets compels them to formulate new ways of expressing issues of homosexuality for which they have no available words. Rhetoric and Sexuality shows that the logic of identity in twentieth-century American poetry becomes a question of rhetoric.