About the book:
The works of John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Fr. Rolfe, among others, have been held up as examples of the strain of homosexuality which runs through late nineteenth-century literature. Here Timothy d'Arch Smith discusses these writers of the Nineties, and reveals among their friends and acquaintances a startling and entirely forgotten group of poets on the edge of, and sometimes outside, the circle, who celebrated in their poetry the love of adolescent boys.
Boy-love, as opposed to homosexuality, is seldom the subject for a book, and this study exposes, not an occasional neurotic scribbler who printed his effusions to boys, but a tight-knit, cohesive group existing in what was until now considered a period somewhat over-researched. Timothy d'Arch Smith suggests that, while the decadent movement may have encouraged these poets to write more fearlessly than they might have in another literary period, they in fact flourished some years before the Nineties and continued as late as 1930. Since many of the poets here discussed printed their books in small private editions or, in their commercially published volumes, changed the sex of their beloved, considerable research was needed to write their history. The result is this study of what the author calls the "Uranian" movement, a detailed, annotated and curiously illustrated account of a hitherto unsuspected phenomenon in English poetry.
The book also includes an appendix on two poets who come into the group but whose circumstances caused them to fall outside the main story: John Moray Stuart-Young, the Manchester boy who claimed to have been an intimate friend of Oscar Wilde; and Ralph Chubb, poet-printer and the Uranian equivalent of William Blake, whose prophetic lithographed books printed on his own press proclaimed a religion based on boy-love.
