Homoerotics and Self-Censorship in the Early Poetry of Shmuel Yankev Imber

Challenging contemporaneous literary and social norms, the poetic ‘I’ in the first volume of poetry published by Shmuel Yankev Imber, What I Sing and Say, reveals an ambiguous sexual identity. This chapter argues that the author self-censored the homoerotic references in those poems for Rose Petals, a collection of his poems published a few years later, and retraces the changes undertaken to erase the evocation of homoerotic desire. The chapter reflects on the reception of Imber’s poetry and on the broader literary, cultural, and societal context in which it emerged, and retraces the later acts of self-censorship.