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'Advice to youth (For Guillaume)', by Countee Cullen

A poem from the Everyman's Library edition of gay and lesbian poetry, Love Speaks Its Name

16 June 2016
Love Speaks Its Name
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Since little time is granted here
    For pride in pain or play,
Since blood soon cools before that Fear
    That makes our prowess clay,
If lips to kiss are freely met,
    Lad, be not proud nor shy;
There are no lips where men forget,
    And undesiring lie.

Countee Cullen

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Love Speaks Its Name

  • Love Speaks Its Name

    Everyman's Library POCKET POETS
  • From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter – a marvellous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry. The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo’s ‘‘Love Misinterpreted’’ to Noël Coward’s ‘‘Mad About the Boy,’’ from May Swenson’s ‘‘Symmetrical Companion’’ to Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘‘Looking at Each Other,’’ these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.
  • Buy the book

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