Of Ouija boards and the fourth dimension: queer American poetry and the world beyond

To coincide with this year’s theme for LGBT History Month, ‘Religion, Belief and Philosophy’, this lecture explores the life and work of four gay American poets of the 19th and 20th centuries: Walt Whitman, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Hart Crane and James Merrill.

Each writer became fascinated with different forms of belief, whether it was mysticism, the unconscious or the occult and used these ideas to inspire their work. But these beliefs also allowed the poets to write about their sexualities, creating ground-breaking texts that challenged the times in which they lived. What can such an imagined community of poets tell us about being ‘queer’ in the 20th century, an what can they suggest about the relationship between belief and sexuality today?