In 1873 John Addington Symonds (left) published his Studies of the Greek Poets, emboldened by recognizing a kindred gay love in the ancients. From the current New York Review of Books:
"Like certain others of the “Oxford Hellenists” of the mid-nineteenth century—including Walter Pater, another figure whose work Wilde would admire extravagantly—Symonds was a secret homosexual who sought, through readings of the Greek classics, to find both expression for and justification of his own sexual nature. Indeed, Symonds later wrote in his memoirs that he had virtually discovered his sexuality through a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium: the night he read their “panegyric of paiderastic love” was “one of the most important of my life.” In time, he would go on to write explicitly about Greek homosexuality in A Problem in Greek Ethics, a text that was circulated privately for ten years before its eventual publication, in 1883, and is now seen as a foundational document of modern homosexual studies.
"However flowery his style and whatever lip service he paid to conventional condemnation of “paiderastia,” there were those who were able to read between the lines of Symonds’s work—especially the lines of the final chapter of the second volume of Studies of the Greek Poets, with its controversial defense of Greek rather than Judeo-Christian morals, which he dismissed as “theistic fancies liable to change.” (Phyllis Grosskurth’s 1964 biography of Symonds retells an amusing anecdote about a “shocked compositor” who, after setting the type of Symonds’s book, wrote an outraged letter to the author.) The critic and sometime watercolorist Richard St John Tyrwhitt fulminated against Symonds’s book in a lengthy article that appeared in The Contemporary Review, warning that Studies of the Greek Poets advocated “the total denial of any moral restraint on any human impulses.” As a result of the controversy surrounding the second volume of his study, Symonds reluctantly withdrew his candidacy for the Poetry Chair at Oxford."
In 1876, student Oscar Wilde (right) spent his summer vacation writing a critique of Symonds' views of Homer, now published as a 103-page book called The Women of Homer. The young Wilde doesn't hesitate to school Symonds and "all other writers I have read" on what they've misunderstood about Penelope's private emotions. Now, writing in NYROB classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn critiques Wilde's essay, continuing his paragraphs above with:
"The breathtaking self-assurance of this pronouncement suggests why Wilde’s long-forgotten text is intriguing, for reasons other than the glimpse it gives us of the road not taken by a significant cultural figure. The confrontation between Wilde and Symonds is, in the end, a confrontation between two eras. In Wilde’s dismissal of Symonds and the rest, you can already hear not only the voice of the mature writer, blithely dismissing the intellectual and social conventions of his age, but the voice of an as yet unborn criticism, one particularly willing to question prevailing assumptions about style, canons, and gender. Like the best of his mature work, this juvenile piece seems to leapfrog forward from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century."
Amping the gay icon quotient higher still, Mendelsohn brings in Walt Whitman at the end of his essay, quoting Wilde: "Whitman is a great writer…. There is more of the Greek residing in him than in any modern poet. His poetry is Homeric in its large pure delight of men and woman, and in the joy the writer has and shows through it all in the sunshine and breeze of outdoor life."
Much as I admire all five of the gay authors here, this essay feels less than urgent, and more suited to an academic journal, especially because it's a review of a rare book not available in the U.S. and not for sale on Amazon.co.uk. You can order it through the Oscar Wilde Society of London. However, Mendelsohn does include, without discussion, another title by one of the new book's co-editors, Thomas Wright: Last year's unusual and intriguing biography, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
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