Queer Space: Romanticism to Mid-Twentieth Century American Poetics

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Jerome McGann sees some Romantic elegies as 'ecstatic', challenging their own memorial function through considering'all things on a basis of present and immediate life'. Timothy Morton approaches this dynamic through his notion of 'darkecology', arguing that the elegized subject becomes folded into the elegiac environment. This understanding is 'queer',openly borrowing thought on the blurring of human and nonhuman from queer theorists. However, little has been said onthe reversibility of this critical understanding: ecology can be 'queered', queerness can be 'ecologised'. This thesis shallinvestigate this oversight through the 'Thryza' cycle of elegiac poems, written by Lord Byron for his lover John Edleston,where his proto-ecological poetics simultaneously articulate and obfuscate the queer body. This thesis will then establisha theoretical lineage that runs from Romanticism to mid-twentieth century American poetics - particularly that of FrankO'Hara and John Wieners. The queer ecological frameworks of the 'Thryza' cycle illuminate the representation of thequeer body in the poetic, and urban, environments of these poets. The thesis shall demonstrate these poetic and urbanspaces as 'elegiac', signalling same-sex desire through spaces which implicate their own violent or mortal rupture. Thisproject, through its combination of theoretical methodologies,