Choice 评论

Though Martin (Universite de Montreal) created a furor with the original version of this study (CH, May'80), offering unusually frank readings of Whitman and Crane that took some aback, most later gay studies of these poets are indebted to his work--e.g., Byrne R.S. Fone's Masculine Landscapes (1992) and T. Yingling's Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text (CH, Mar'91). Martin also offered a provocative chapter on turn-of-the-century academic poets like Halleck, Taylor, and Santayana and another with surprising readings of Ginsberg, Duncan, Gunn, Field, Howard, Merrill, and Corn. This "expanded" edition adds a 19-page chapter, printed after the original text and index, in which Martin redresses his omission of minority writers with brief takes on Langston Hughes, Marlon Riggs, and Reginald Shepherd and confronts AIDS themes in the poetry of Paul Monette, Rafael Campo, and Mark Doty. The most important aspect of Martin's study, then and now, is his reversal of Harold Bloom's Anxiety of Influence (1973), which posited an Oedipal (therefore heterosexual) relationship between past masters and apprentices. Libraries with the first edition need not add this one, since Martin does not revise his original chapters and adds little that is new. All college or university libraries without the first edition, however, need this one. All academic collections. M. J. Emery Cottey College