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In 1861 , John Addington Symonds , a twenty - one - yr - previous student at Oxford who already get laid he have a go at it and was attracted to men , hastily wrote out a seeming forgoing of the long love poem he ’d written to another young homo . In her bookOutrages , Naomi Wolf chronicle the struggle and eventual victory of Symonds — who would become a poet , biographer , and critic — at a time in British story when even individual varsity letter that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as grounds in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law .
The pursual is an selection from the bookOutragesby Naomi Wolf . It has been adapted for the entanglement .
I was at the Morgan Library and Museum calculate for a young man , now long stagnant — a nineteen - yr - honest-to-goodness educatee at Balliol College , Oxford . In 1859 , John Addington Symonds was deep in love with a fellow adolescent whom , I know , he had identified carefully only as “ W. ”
John Addington Symonds
I was looking for the only handwritten manuscript of the unpublished love letter Symonds had written, which at once celebrated this teenage love and mourned its apparent renunciation.
The sexual love missive take up the form of a prospicient poetical manuscript , written entirely in quatrains . Phyllis Grosskurth , who in 1964 had write a biography of Symonds titled The deplorable Victorian , had in pass described this love verse form , as had others who knew about Symonds ’s now largely forgotten work . The poem ’s name is “ In Memoriam Arcadie . ”
John Addington Symonds
What had young John Addington Symonds meant by the title ? In Hellenic mythology , “ Arkady ” is the rugged mountainous rest home of the god Pan , where human being lived in harmony with the rude purchase order . Pan was also the deity of unchecked sexual impulsion , a mischief - Lord , and a instrumentalist .
“ In Memoriam ” is Latin for “ in the memory of , ” a phrase used in elegies — that is , in verses write to say adios forever to suffer loved ones . This nineteen - year - old , in other words , was signaling in his title that he was writing an elegy for a lost love , and a lost paradise .
But like much of Symonds ’s most important writing , the love letter / poem had not been officially published during his lifetime . In fact , this study had never been publish at all . And John Addington Symonds had made as certain as he could that a research worker would have to dog this manuscript down in person and then supplicate a trusted keeper of the textual matter in parliamentary procedure to have a look at it .
He had continually buried his true meanings, even while leaving clues for their discovery.
John Addington Symonds ’s undergraduate college was Balliol College , at the University of Oxford ; his graduate college , at the same university , Magdalen . A hundred and fifty - five year afterward , I was a alumna student too , at New College , just a few streets away from both . My dissertation adviser was Dr. Stefano - Maria Evangelista , who had write an influential Koran about straightlaced queerness and the idea of the Greeks , call in British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece : Hellenism , Reception , Gods in Exile .
One twenty-four hour period , in the well-situated top - base survey at Trinity College where we met hebdomadally so he could review my work , Dr. Evangelista handed me two Brobdingnagian volume bound in a deep - olive - gullible fabric . There was a third book waiting on his bookshelf , to be taken up when I was cease with the first two . The al-Qur’an contain the letter of someone of whom I had never listen — John Addington Symonds . “You should read these , ” my professor had said .
This began a journey of five age of bailiwick , during which I grew increasingly fascinated with this tough , hagridden , world - changing character . The more I got to know John Addington Symonds through his letters , and the more I record about the men and women around him , the more present he seemed : in spite of the lapse of time between our life , in Oxford especially , he often seemed to be just down the street ; at times , when I was reading his letters in the Bodleian , the main inquiry library at the University of Oxford , or the New College Library , his prescient voice seemed just a carrel away .
Every day , as I walk over the cobblestone pass out of New College , passed under the arched Bridge of Sighs , and kick the bucket out along Broad Street , I saw Balliol ’s neo - Gothic threshold on my right . I could peek in at the unruffled lawn of the court and at the gabled rooms where this making love thing , between lover who were just grown out of boyhood , had been carried out — and then , it seemed , been foreshorten painfully short .
John Addington Symonds , his sister Charlotte Symonds Green , and the imperious Dr. Symonds , 1867 .
In life , Symonds composed volumes and volumes — biographies , travel essay , books of poetry , graphics literary criticism , translation , and textbooks . His letters alone , as I mention , constitute three massive tomes . He was , if anything , persistent in state himself . Nonetheless , he also assert on silences . John Addington Symonds became the centerpiece of my 2015 doctoral thesis — but even after that was discharge and handed in , I maintain learning more about him from the stupefying clues that he had left behind for archivists and scholar .
Though little recognise today outside the academic study of priggish studies and queer studies , Symonds should have a far more prominent place in history . He can rightfully be describe as one of the fathers of the modern gay right motion . He can even be called an mastermind of what we now understand as the forward-looking identity of male homosexuality in the West . His insistency regarding how to recollect about sexual love — and his need that virile - male love life and attraction be recognized as innate , natural , and healthy , rather than as acquired “ psychoneurosis , ” degeneracies , or diseases — helped craft our modern understanding of what it mean to be a piece who loves and desires other man .
Symonds would , until the very end of his living , use codification to utter his messages about passion between men : he employed metaphors , misdirection , visual emblem , embargo manuscripts , and lockboxes both rhetorical and real . He would spend his aliveness make and then blot out those straight meanings , leaving signals for us , the men and women of the future , to decipher .
He tried to cover the issue of homo loving human being in a broad range of musical style : translating biographies and sonnets of homosexual artists such as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini ; write a textbook of the lives of classical Greek poet ; extend thin veiled satire to a college journal ; produce unpublished manifestos that scarce saw the spark of day ; and publishing collection of dearest poems , using feminine pronoun to mask the unfeigned sexuality of the Beloved .
He tried to address the central issue of his life and work by publicly collecting art by a disgraced artist, and by publishing reviews to defend homosexual writers who were under attack.
He give-up the ghost relatively youthful . But by work assiduously for slenderly more than three decades , he scattered deliberately into the future a set of seeds for a more progressive world than the one in which he endure — seeds of the macrocosm we now see around us , if we know in the West . Symonds taste to express his belief that sexual love between men was innate and lifelike before there were conception , let alone language , to fend for this estimate . He was one of the mass who invented the oral communication . He mouth in every room he could as doing so became more and more illegal .
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Outrages
Sex , Censorship , and the Criminalization of Love
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