SOURCE: "Art and AIDS; or, How Will Culture Cure You?," in Raritan, Vol. 14, No. 3, Winter, 1995, pp. 103-18.

In the essay below, Hammer meditates on various aspects of the relation between "culture" and "AIDS"—between aesthetics and sexuality—by comparing Rich's "In Memoriam: D. K." and James Merrill's "Farewell Performance."

This essay will address the question in my title through a reading of two poems. One is by Adrienne Rich, the other by James Merrill; both are elegies for the literary critic David Kalstone. In each case, Kalstone's death in 1986 from AIDS-related causes provokes a troubled meditation on the relation between culture and AIDS. Culture is Rich's word for the high art of Mozart and Keats, and I will use it in that restricted, old-fashioned sense, since it is exactly the high-art forms of the ballet, opera, and lyric that are in question for Rich and Merrill. Culture is...