SOURCE: Jarraway, David R. “‘Creatures of the Rainbow’: Wallace Stevens, Mark Doty, and the Poets of Androgyny.” Mosaic 30, no. 3 (September 1997): 160-83.

In the following essay, Jarraway examines the discourse and poetics of androgyny found in Doty's writing, drawing direct parallels between Doty's exploration of gender and sexual identity and that of Wallace Stevens, particularly as revealed in Stevens's correspondence with José Rodríguez Feo.

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 that the inspiration for James's and Santayana's “recovery” of androgyny was 19th-century poet Walt...