‘A Stoat Came to Tea’: Camp Poetics and Masculinity

While poetry has traditionally been regarded as the highest of literary genres and therefore frequently been associated with idealized male poets and their assumed gravitas, self-subverting forms of ‘camp’ poetics can be traced all the way to the Renaissance. The present essay takes camp poetics as a necessary corrective and self-criticism within a male poetic tradition and explores it in works by poets ranging from Donne to W. H. Auden and John Ashbery. In their works, excess, exaggeration, and strategic extravagance go side by side with often very serious concerns. A camp poetics provides masculinity with a kind of double vision inside which it performs itself while looking quizzically and critically at its own performance at the same time.