Given the extent to which queer writers have played starring roles in most of what we think about when we think about the representative movements and innovations of modern American poetry, this chapter takes up the question of the association between poetry and queerness, asking how the aesthetic invention that characterizes modern American poetry might be related to the expressive capacities of sexuality. My limited and speculative response to this question focuses on how poets, and particular poems, have exploited the queer affordances of the lyric genre. The historical rhyme between the “queer” and the “poet” across the first half of the twentieth century evinces how the uneasy consolidation of aberrant sexual practices into modern homosexual identity coincides with the uneasy consolidation of poetry, in all its diversity, into a particular understanding of the lyric. If the twentieth century presents the gradual conflation of poetry and lyric, modern queer poets found in the lyric’s shared set of expectations a means of living within the social and its reductive demands for visibility, intelligibility, and transparency, while still holding space for the strange or unknowable.

Why is conceptualizing an American avant-garde particularly problematic? How productive is the term “avant-garde” for understanding the development of American modernism? As a concept, the “avant-garde” was defined almost entirely by theorists affiliated in various ways with the Frankfurt School using examples and with political expectations forged in western Europe. Various political and historical assumptions led to theories framing American modernist aesthetics as an impoverished variant of the European model. This chapter begins with a survey of some important theories of the avant-garde before considering the classic American modernist avant-garde – the years 1914–17 in Greenwich Village, New York City – as a case study, using poet William Carlos Williams as its touchstone. Evaluated from the perspective of European accounts, it suggests some limitations to the predominantly European framework of the avant-garde in illuminating American modernism with the example of another American poet: Hart Crane.

A key moment in the history of the dynamic between New Orleans and the major cultural hubs of the Northeast and Europe occurred with the emergence of a “little” magazine in 1921 called the Double Dealer, which published the literary figures who would define the aesthetic and cultural movement known as modernism. The final issues of the magazine gave significant exposure to a writer who was, until then, little known – William Faulkner. The magazine also published Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Thornton Wilder. Though it faltered and finally folded after just a handful of years, it managed to link New Orleans to the most elite cultural channels of the wider world in roughly the same moment that the indigenous music of the city – jazz – came to widespread recognition.