Glory and loveliness have passed away

Along with finding out the death of Clement Freud, I heard yesterday that the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had died, and felt incredibly sad. Freely admitting that as a married woman who enjoyed "vanilla sex", and that she was basically a fag hag of tremendous proportions, she introduced the world to the concept of triangular desire, without which fitcrit would be nothing. In Between Men, Sedgwick demonstrates that in the nineteenth-century novel, desire between men is often played out through a competitive desire for a third woman. It's a great concept, because you can apply it to any pair of straight up straighties and imagine them in all sorts of positions of panting, barely suppressed eroticism.

She also had a really cool aesthetic, which I adored.
As an appropriate tribute to the inventor of the concept of the homosocial, I thought I would put quote one of my favourite passages from Shelley's Adonais, in which he mourns the death of the beautiful Keats:

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made lovely; he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.