Literary Friendships

Hazmat contains the long poem "Ouija," which is a tribute to the late poet James Merrill, one of McClatchy's closest friends and a poet who is often seen as a major influence on McClatchy's early writing. "Ouija" plays on the supernatural world Merrill invoked in his epic The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). McClatchy knew Merrill from 1972 until his death in 1995 and serves as his literary executor.

Sponsor Message.

McClatchy's other literary friendships over the years have included Robert Penn Warren, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Hollander, and Richard Howard, as well as Corn. The first poets to whom he showed his work, besides Corn, were Merrill and Howard.

Conclusion

McClatchy's numerous honors include the Witter Bynner Award for Poetry awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. He has served as the chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Now Professor of English at Yale and editor of The Yale Review, he has also taught at Princeton, Columbia, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and other universities. He currently divides his time between a home in Stonington, Connecticut, and an apartment in New York City.

McClatchy is also one of the most prolific editors and anthologists working today, with nearly twenty volumes to his name, including Poets in Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets (1988); Bright Pages: Yale Writers 1701-2001 (2001); The Collected Poems of James Merrill, co-edited with Stephen Yenser (2001), and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003).

McClatchy's poetry has earned him praise as a writer of probing intellect and emotional acuity. In addition, he is a poet with deep insight into the nature of desire, especially the complexities of gay male desire.

After Stonewall, gay male literature became focused as a movement, aided by the development of gay newspapers, magazines, and quarterlies and the founding of serious gay and lesbian bookstores.

The gay tradition in literature from ancient times to the present is primarily a tradition not of prose but of verse.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Widely acknowledged as one of the finest twentieth-century American poets, Elizabeth Bishop encoded a lesbian identity in her poems.

An intelligent observer and chronicler, and a master of poetic technique, Alfred Corn has been praised as one of his generation's finest poets and included in a line of gay visionary poets.

In his highly accomplished and influential poetry, Horace reflects the easy bisexuality of the Roman upper class in the first century B. C.

Richard Howard's searching and witty poetry, in which homosexuality is not a problem but a solution, is a significant contribution to the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

James Merrill's significance as a gay writer lies in his deliberate use of a personal relationship to fuel his poetry.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.