Hyacinth Boy 
Mark Ford
- T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet by James E. Miller
- The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey
- Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ by Lawrence Rainey
Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like Hart had the delusion that Eliot was homosexual.’
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Mark Ford teaches in the English department at University College London. This year he has published editions of the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery.
Other articles by this contributor:
Love and Theft · plagiarism
The Style It Takes · John Cale
Red makes wrong · Harry Mathews
print layout
tell a friend