Vivian Pollak begins with Whitman’s reputation as a sodomite and pederast in his time and ours. She traces the development of this reputation in his early fiction and in the first editions of Leaves of Grass. Although many of Whitman’s contemporaries agreed that the poet had a “sex handicap,” they disagreed about its nature. Pollak argues such “sex handicaps” open a space for thinking about queer community. She offers a close reading of three Dickinson poems that variously engage the concept of sex handicaps and shows that the heteronormative “Master” motif shrunk Dickinson’s erotic range. Eventually, however, even Robert Frost addressed the search for a historical “Master.” Pollak notes Frost’s early interest in “fairies,” describes his disidentification with his self-destructive father, and highlights his bond with his writerly mother, Belle Moodie Frost. Pollak reads Frost’s 1913 poem “Mowing” as a brilliant analysis of erotic conflict and its partial resolution. Although Frost is not usually recognized as a queer writer, Pollak suggests that a collective struggle with “sex handicaps,” however queerly defined, constitutes an important tradition in American poetry and poetics.

This chapter returns to American fascination with the Orient in the modernist era to consider the work of Asian writers in the US in a period of rising nativism and hardening policies of exclusion. The modernist aesthete and the modern liberal mark out defining poles for the reception of literary works by Asians in this period, and my discussion is structured around the influence of the high modernist orientalism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the work of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi, the strictures of Pearl Buck’s interwar humanitarianism for the work of Lin Yutang and H. T. Tsiang, and finally a pair of writers unfettered by prevailing Orientalist modes, Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa. All of these writers present transpacific imaginations unconstrained by their constituting bonds: they fashioned new selves, pitched anti-imperialist philosophies, and produced electrifying art.