“The first full-fledged attempt by a gay critic to put the gay writers of the American past in proper perspective.”—Leslie Fiedler, author of Love and Death in the American Novel

“The first to offer …a fully homoerotic reading of Whitman.”—Thomas Yingling, author of Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text

“[Martin's] is a judicious daring we have not had in Whitman criticism before; he proves there is a critical language for discussing such things. But the important thing is Martin's daring…bold and suggestive.”—Karl Keller in Texas Studies in Literature and Language

“These essays …provide a persuasive argument for the existence of a homosexual tradition in American poetry, a tradition that 'has operated through a series of more or less coded references' to create a distinct 'literature of indirection.' Like the histories and analyses of lesbian poetry that many feminist critics have lately begun to produce, this book is valuable for its examination of a subject whose name critics have for too long refused to speak.”—Sandra M. Gilbert in American Literary Scholarship

“The Homosexual Tradition remains a remarkable achievement in the history of gay scholarship and belongs on the shelf of everyone who want to understand Whitman.”—Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review