Several important editions have appeared since World War II, improving scholarly comprehension of textual issues and making Michelangelo's literary efforts available to a broader audience. The relatively recent edition by James Saslow prints the Italian texts along with literal English translations that are helpful to students whose Italian is in need of assistance.

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Conclusion

With the rise of lesbian and gay studies in the 1980s and l990s, it seems certain that Michelangelo's poetic canon will continue to provoke interest and remain a point of contention for debates about how the self was sexually constructed in Renaissance discourse.

If a gay male author is defined loosely as someone whose erotic drives and fantasies are directed principally toward members of his own sex, then Michelangelo should be deemed an appropriate figure to be understood as participating in the evolution of the gay literary tradition. The poems--perhaps our most meaningful evidence for Michelangelo's construction of sexual selfhood--teem with homoerotic dynamism and an attendant ethic of sublimation.

Although Michelangelo wrote in a variety of verse forms and literary modes, the sonnets that address appealing male beloveds are, at their best, his most intriguing contribution to the literary history of same-sex desire. The poet's lack of formal education and training in classical languages did not impede his ability to write verse that surpassed that of many of his more learned contemporaries.

Innovative, obscure, elliptical, at times metrically and ideologically unorthodox--Michelangelo's poetic legacy deserves the full attention of the academy. Indeed, not until Shakespeare would another sonneteer represent same-sex desire with such sensuous complexity, emotional resonance, and linguistic artfulness.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

Until quite recently, male homosexuality has had a discontinuous, fragmented, and largely condemnatory history in Italian literature, and lesbianism has been almost totally ignored.

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

Since antiquity Ganymede, the beautiful Phrygian youth abducted by Jupiter, has served as an artistic expression for homosexuality.

In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.

The most famous artist who ever lived, Michelangelo left an enormous legacy in sculpture, painting, drawing, architecture, and poetry; while the artist's sexual behavior cannot be documented, the homoerotic character of his drawings, letters, and poetry is unmistakable.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.