Born in Spain, Santayana moved to the United States at age nine with his mother, settling in Boston, where, as student and later instructor at Harvard, he began his career as poet and philosopher. (His students there included T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens; and sometime in 1895 or 1896, he met Gertrude Stein).

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Santayana spent the last four decades of his life traveling throughout Europe, living by his pen. It was during this period as belles lettrist that he wrote his novel The Last Puritan (1935), as well as such major philosophical works as Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and the four-volume Realms of Being (1927-1940).

Santayana's place in the gay literary tradition derives perhaps less directly from his writings (though the subtle of The Last Puritan is a significant contribution) than from the impact of antigay bigotry on his professional life at Harvard. Although regarded as brilliant by his peers (including William James), Santayana's status as a bachelor met with the university administration's clear disapproval.

Harvard president Charles Eliot remarked that Santayana's literary activities might prove "something futile, or even harmful, because unnatural and untimely"--darkly hinting at additional irregularities beyond his aestheticism. From 1889 through 1907, Santayana remained an instructor, and was only promoted to professor in 1907, following publication of The Life of Reason (1905-1906), a quasi-Hegelian work in five volumes.

Almost immediately after his mother's death in 1912, Santayana resigned his professorship and spent the rest of his life as writer and wandering scholar.

By his own account, Santayana did not really understand his own sexual preference until fairly late in life. During a 1929 conversation about A. E. Housman, a favorite poet, Santayana told his secretary Daniel Cory that Housman "was really what people nowadays call 'homosexual'; the sentiment of his poems is unmistakable." Santayana then added: "I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days, though I was unconscious of it at the time."

One finds Santayana's clearest expression in a set of four elegiac sonnets for Warwick Potter, a young man Santayana called his "last real friend," who died of cholera following a boating accident in 1893. The sequence, "To W.P." (1894) inevitably recalls Milton's "Lycidas," though Santayana's poem is much less an exercise in literary and mythological allusion than Milton's.

More than "Lycidas," it seems a genuine outpouring of grief--though the sense of loss is transformed by the poet into resignation and even acceptance: "For time a sadder mask may spread / Over the face that ever should be young."

The sequence ends on a note of transcendence, with his grieving friends vowing to Potter to "Keep you in whatsoe'er things are good, and rear / In our weak virtues monuments to you." Even so, Santayana's most powerful lines convey the wounding permanence of loss: "And I scarce know which part may greater be-- / What I keep of you, or you rob from me."

The audience for Santayana's work declined precipitously following his death. His literary talent as a prose artist has only made him suspect among philosophers. During recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in his life and work, and 1986 saw publication of the first of twenty volumes in a critical edition of The Works of George Santayana.

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