Gerard Manley Hopkins was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame places him among leading English poets. His prosody – notably his concept of sprung rhythm – established him as an innovator, as did his praise of God through vivid use of imagery and nature. Only after his death did Robert Bridges publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 Hopkins's work was seen as one of the most original literary advances of his century. It intrigued such leading 20th-century poets as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.
Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, also known as Bosie Douglas, was an English poet and journalist, and a lover of Oscar Wilde. At Oxford he edited an undergraduate journal, The Spirit Lamp, that carried a homoerotic subtext, and met Wilde, starting a close but stormy relationship. Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, abhorred it and set out to humiliate Wilde, publicly accusing him of homosexuality. Wilde sued him for criminal libel, but some intimate notes were found and Wilde was later imprisoned. On his release, he briefly lived with Douglas in Naples, but they had separated by the time Wilde died in 1900. Douglas married a poet, Olive Custance, in 1902 and had a son, Raymond.
John Addington Symonds Jr. was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although married with children, Symonds supported male love (homosexuality), which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible. He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.
Walter Horatio Pater was an English essayist, art and literary critic, and fiction writer, regarded as one of the great stylists. His first and most often reprinted book, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), revised as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1877), in which he outlined his approach to art and advocated an ideal of the intense inner life, was taken by many as a manifesto of Aestheticism.
The Blue Grotto is a sea cave on the coast of the island of Capri, southern Italy. Sunlight shining through an underwater cavity is reflected back upward through the seawater below the cavern, giving the water a blue glow that illuminates the cavern. The cave extends some 50 metres into the cliff at the surface, and is about 150 metres (490 ft) deep, with a sandy bottom.
Uranian is a historical term for homosexual men. The word was also used as an adjective in association with male homosexuality or inter-male attraction regardless of sexual orientation.
Edwin Emmanuel Bradford was an English clergyman and a Uranian poet and writer of stories, articles and sermons. His prolific verse celebrating the high spiritual status of love between men and boys was remarkably well-received and favourably reviewed in his lifetime.
John Gambril (Francis) Nicholson (1866–1931) was an English school teacher, poet, and amateur photographer. He was one of the Uranians, a clandestine group of British men who wrote poetry idealizing the beauty and love of adolescent boys. As a school master at various boarding schools in England and Wales, Nicholson formed "passionate friendships" with some of his students, and dedicated much of his poetry to favoured students.
William Johnson Cory, born William Johnson, was an English educator and poet. He was dismissed from his post at Eton for encouraging a culture of intimacy, possibly non-sexual, between teachers and pupils. He is widely known for his English version of the elegy Heraclitus by Callimachus.
Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, including both male–male and female–female attraction. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homosexuality" implies a more permanent state of identity or sexual orientation. It has been depicted or manifested throughout the history of the visual arts and literature and can also be found in performative forms; from theatre to the theatricality of uniformed movements. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is "pertaining to or characterized by a tendency for erotic emotions to be centered on a person of the same sex; or pertaining to a homo-erotic person."
Simeon Solomon was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites who was noted for his depictions of Jewish life and same-sex desire. His career was cut short as a result of public scandal following his arrests and convictions for attempted sodomy in 1873 and 1874.
Edward Perry Warren was an American millionaire, art collector and the author of works proposing an idealized view of homosexual relationships. He is now best known as the former owner of the Warren Cup in the British Museum.
George Cecil Ives was an English poet, writer, penal reformer and early homosexual law reform campaigner.
Francis Edwin Murray (1854-1932) was a Uranian poet and publisher of the late 19th and early 20th century. Almost totally forgotten today, his books of verse include Rondeaux of Boyhood (1923), limited to 300 copies, and From a Lover's Garden: More Rondeaux and Other Verses of Boyhood (1924), limited to 225 copies. The former was written under the pseudonym A. Newman. The latter contained an introduction by fellow Uranian John Gambril Nicholson. Murray also wrote a bibliography of Austin Dobson, published in 1900. Murray worked as a printer, bookseller and publisher in Brompton Road, London. He printed the works of other Uranians, including John Leslie Barford. Bruce Robinson has acknowledged Rondeaux of Boyhood as source material for the dialogue of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I.
John Leslie Barford (1886–1937) was an English Uranian poet who wrote under the pseudonym of Philebus.
John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939) was an English Uranian poet, memoirist, novelist and merchant trader. Stuart-Young published numerous works, including books of poetry, novels, descriptions of African life and autobiographical works. His poems are closely linked to fin-de-siècle and Uranian themes, being informed by decadence, colonialism, and pederasty.
Homoerotic poetry is a genre of poetry implicitly dealing with same-sex romantic or sexual interaction. The male-male erotic tradition encompasses poems by major poets such as Pindar, Theognis of Megara, Anacreon, Catullus, Virgil, Martial, Abu Nuwas, Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, W. H. Auden, Fernando Pessoa and Allen Ginsberg. In the female-female tradition, authors may include those such as Sappho, "Michael Field", "Marie-Madeleine" and Maureen Duffy. Other poets wrote poems and letters with homoerotic overtones toward individuals, such as Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert.
The Cremorne was a pornographic magazine published by William Lazenby in London in 1882. The title alludes to Cremorne Gardens which had by that time become a haunt of prostitutes. The magazine was a sequel to The Pearl. The Cremorne folded in 1882.
William Lazenby was an English publisher of pornography active in the 1870s and 1880s. He used the aliases Duncan Cameron and Thomas Judd. His notable publications include magazines The Pearl, which published poems thought to have been written by Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Oyster, The Boudoir and The Cremorne He also published such books as The Romance of Lust, Randiana, or Excitable Tales, The Birchen Bouquet (1881), The Romance of Chastisement (1883), The Pleasures of Cruelty (1886) and The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. He was an associate of Edward Avery and Leonard Smithers. He was prosecuted in 1871 and again in 1881.
Cuthbert Vail Wright was an American literary critic, writer, poet, and educator.
