The Other Orpheus - A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality (Hardcover, annotated edition)

This book posits that male homoeroticism is a crucial component of any comprehensive understanding of modernism and the crisis of modern masculine identity. Cole explores how homoerotic affect - instantiated in the works of Rimbaud, Crane and Eliot - contributes to queer theory, and shows what poetry has to offer critical inquiry. This book aims to re-establish an interest in poetry by integrating question of prosody and aesthetics with political literary study. Cole used the methodological insights of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and Marxism to elaborate the social significance of poetic experiment, and reinvigorate the concepts of affect and imagination, while arguing against antiformalist approaches to literature.