SOURCE: Jarraway, David R. “‘Creatures of the Rainbow’: Wallace Stevens, Mark Doty, and the Poetics of Androgyny.” Mosaic 30, no. 3 (September 1997): 169-83.

In the following essay, the author compares the “poetics of androgyny” in the works of Doty and Wallace Stevens. The discourse of androgyny, according to the author, “bespeaks a uniquely gendered space fraught with relaxations of the known,” and he claims the poetry of Stevens and his admirer Doty both exemplify an attentiveness to “living in difference.”

In his landmark The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (1991), Ross Posnock advances the claim that, in remarkably parallel ways, novelist Henry James and philosopher George Santayana undertook throughout their writing careers “to create new forms of sexual identity, new configurations of mastery and passivity, femininity and masculinity.” Noting how in their work “the androgynous becomes an alternative model of behavior,” Posnock further observes...