Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic

Author / Editor
Guy-Bray, Stephen.

Title
Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic

Published
Buffalo, N.Y.; and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

Physical Description
xviii, 132 pp.

Description
Argues that poetic influence can be regarded as an erotic or romantic relationship between male couples, focusing on literature of Dante, Spenser, and Hart Crane and questioning notions of literary influence promulgated by T. S. Eliot and Harold Bloom. Chapter 2, "Chaucer and Spenser and Other Male Couples" (pp. 28-60) considers how Book 4 of Spenser's "Faerie Queene" dramatizes "the process by which heteroeroticism drives out homoeroticism." Spenser changes his sources--Chaucer's SqT and the anonymous "Amys and Amylion"--to present a narrative in which "attachments between men are ultimately superseded by marital and familial attachments . . . just as Spenser uses the Knight's Tale to recast the Squire's Tale."

Chaucer Subjects
Chaucer's Influence and Later Allusion
Squire and His Tale
Knight and His Tale