All the World in Thee

Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.

All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.