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Poets have depicted queer desire, same-sex love, and life outside gender norms since the beginning of the written word. Across eras and generations—from classical Greece to Renaissance England to the Harlem Renaissance—such experiences could be put into verse even when they would not have been named as we name them today. Some of these poems invite passion and admiration; others provoke new historical and literary inquiry.
All the World in Thee presents a selection of poems about LGBTQ+ experiences, spanning from English translations of Homer, Sappho, and Catullus to canonical poetry by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tennyson through early-twentieth-century writers including Angelina Weld Grimké, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes. It features verse by well-known figures like John Donne, Lord Byron, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein alongside lesser-known or recently rediscovered works, such as the first lesbian love poems recorded in Great Britain, bawdy eighteenth-century ballads, and homoerotic late-nineteenth-century poems about cowboys and football players. A critical introduction discusses patterns of LGBTQ+ poetry that persist across genres and centuries as well as the fraught history of representations of whiteness and racial difference. Edited by three prominent poetry critics and scholars, All the World in Thee provides a poignant and powerful new way to understand LGBTQ+ identities and feelings over time.
— Nikki Skillman, author of The Lyric in the Age of the Brain
Stephanie Burt is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. Her many books include Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift (2025); Super Gay Poems: LGBTQ+ Poetry After Stonewall (2025); and Don’t Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (2019).
Drew Daniel is professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Throbbing Gristle’s Twenty Jazz Funk Greats (2008) and Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature (2022). He is also one half of the acclaimed electronic band Matmos.
Melissa E. Sanchez is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies (2025) and the author of Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition (2019), among other books.
Introduction
Part I. Circa Eighth Century BCE to Second Century CE
Homer (8th–7th century BCE)
Sappho (c. 630–570 BCE)
Anacreon (c. 582–485 BCE)
Theocritus (3rd century BCE)
Catullus (84–54 BCE)
Virgil (70–19 BCE)
Ovid (43 BCE–17 CE)
Martial (c. 38–104 CE)
Part II. Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374)
Hafez (c. 1310–1390)
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475–1564)
Anne Locke (c. 1533–c. 1590)
Marie Maitland (c. 1550–1596)
Edmund Spenser (1552–1599)
Philip Sidney (1554–1586)
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593)
Henry Reynolds (1563–1635)
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Thomas Nashe (1567–c. 1601)
Thomas Heywood (c. 1570–1641)
John Donne (1572–1631)
Ben Jonson (1572–1637)
Richard Barnfield (1574–1620)
“T.W.” [Thomas Woodward (baptized 1576, died seventeenth century)]
Thomas Middleton (1580–1627)
Francis Beaumont (1584–1616)
William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649)
Henry King (1592–1669)
George Herbert (1593–1633)
Thomas Carew (c. 1594–1640)
Hester Pulter (c. 1605–1678)
Edmund Waller (1606–1687)
John Milton (1608–1674)
Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649)
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
Charles Cotton (1630–1687)
Katherine Philips (1631–1664)
Aphra Behn (1640–1689)
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680)
Sor Juana (Juana Inés de la Cruz) (1648–1695)
Anne Killigrew (1660–1685)
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720)
Anonymous (late 1600s)
Part III. Eighteenth Century
Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718)
Elizabeth Thomas (1675–1731)
Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743)
Anonymous (early 1700s)
Anonymous (early 1700s)
Thomas Gilbert (1713–1766)
Thomas Gray (1716–1771)
Susanna Highmore Duncombe (1725–1812)
Anonymous (mid-1700s)
Anonymous (late 1700s)
Anonymous (late 1700s)
Anna Seward (1742–1809)
Part IV. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
William Beckford (1760–1844) or George Colman (1762–1836) or Anonymous
Mary Matilda Betham (1776–1852)
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824)
Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867)
Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
Bayard Taylor (1825–1878)
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
John Addington Symonds (1840–1893)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
Edward Carpenter (1844–1929)
“Michael Field” (Katherine Bradley, 1846–1913, and Edith Cooper, 1862–1913)
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
George Moore (1852–1933)
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Horatio Brown (1854–1926)
Edward Cracroft Lefroy (1855–1891)
George Edward Woodberry (1855–1930)
A. E. Housman (1859–1936)
Amy Levy (1861–1889)
John Gambril Nicholson (1861–1931)
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907)
Marc-André Raffalovich (1864–1924)
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)
Charlotte Mew (1869–1927)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945)
Pierre Louÿs (1870–1925)
Nora Hopper Chesson (1871–1906)
Willa Cather (1873–1947)
Amy Lowell (1874–1925)
Rose O’Neill (1874–1944)
Ursula Bethell (1874–1945)
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1937)
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
Douglas Malloch (1877–1938)
James Stephens (1880–1950)
Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958)
John Moray Stuart-Young (Odeziaku) (1881–1939)
Charles Badger Clark (1883–1957)
George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962)
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939)
H.D. (1886–1961)
Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)
Claude McKay (1889–1948)
Geoffrey Cust Faber (1889–1961)
Lesbia Harford (1891–1927)
Archie Austin Coates (1891–1967)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
“Clement Andrews” (20th century)
Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986)
Hart Crane (1899–1932)
Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
Richard Bruce Nugent (1906–1987)
Langston Hughes (1901–1967)
Acknowledgments
Sources and Texts, with a Note on the Texts
Biographies
Suggestions for Further Reading
Index