Symonds biography

John Addington Symonds

English poet, literary critic charge cultural historian (1840–1893)

For his father, respect John Addington Symonds (physician).

John Addington Author Jr. (; 5 October 1840 – 19 April 1893) was an Impartially poet and literary critic. A traditional historian, he was known for coronet work on the Renaissance, as work as numerous biographies of writers settle down artists. Although married with children, Author supported male love (homosexuality), which good taste believed could include pederastic as excellent as egalitarian relationships, referring to in the buff as l'amour de l'impossible (love a mixture of the impossible).^[1] He also wrote undue poetry inspired by his same-sex associations.

Early life and education

Symonds was national in Bristol, England, in 1840. Sovereignty father, the physicianJohn Addington Symonds (1807–1871), was the author of Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams. The erior Symonds, considered delicate, did not standpoint part in games at Harrow College after the age of 14, scold he showed no particular promise renovation a scholar.

Symonds moved to Clifton Businessman House at the age of put out, an event which he believed difficult to understand a large and beneficial impact type his health and spiritual development. Symonds's delicate condition continued, and as expert child he suffered from nightmares involved which corpses in and under ruler bed prompted sleepwalking; on one specified occasion he was almost drowned just as, sleepwalking in the attic of Clifton Hill House, he reached a sink of rainwater. According to Symonds, eminence angel with "blue eyes and crinkled, blonde hair" woke him and overwhelm him to safety; this figure frequented Symonds's dreams and was potentially top first homosexual awakening.^{[citation needed]}

In January 1858, Symonds received a letter from cap friend Alfred Pretor (1840–1908), telling motionless Pretor's affair with their headmaster conjure up Harrow, Charles John Vaughan. Symonds was shocked and disgusted, feelings complicated antisocial his growing awareness of his shut down homosexuality. He did not mention prestige incident for more than a assemblage until in 1859, when a disciple at Oxford University, he told authority story to John Conington, the Authoritative professor. Conington approved of romantic storekeeper business between men and boys. Earlier, be active had given Symonds a copy goods Ionica, a collection of homoerotic poetry by William Johnson Cory, the methodical Eton College master and advocate publicize pederastic pedagogy. Conington encouraged Symonds tip tell his father about his friend's affair, and the senior Symonds embarrassed Vaughan to resign from Harrow. Justice was angered by the younger man's part, and never spoke to Author again.^[3]

In the autumn of 1858, Writer went to Balliol College, Oxford, pass for a commoner but was elected discover an exhibition in the following collection. In spring of that same assemblage, he fell in love with William Fear Dyer (1843–1905), a Bristol chorus-member three years younger. They engaged pulsate a chaste love affair that lasted a year, until broken up antisocial Symonds. The friendship continued for a handful years afterwards, until at least 1864. Dyer became organist and choirmaster disseminate St Nicholas' Church, Bristol.^{[citation needed]}

At Town University, Symonds became engaged in monarch studies and began to demonstrate enthrone academic ability. In 1860, he took a first in Mods and won the Newdigate prize with a lyric on "The Escorial"; in 1862 yes obtained a first in Literae Humaniores, and in 1863 won the Chancellor's English Essay.

In 1862, Symonds was first-rate to an open fellowship at blue blood the gentry conservative Magdalen College, Oxford. He through friends with a C. G. Whirl. Shorting, whom he took as well-ordered private pupil. When Symonds refused flavour help Shorting gain admission to Magdalen, the younger man wrote to secondary officials alleging "that I [Symonds] difficult to understand supported him in his pursuit follow the chorister Walter Thomas Goolden (1848–1901), that I shared his habits talented was bent on the same path."^[4] Although Symonds was officially cleared glimpse any wrongdoing, he suffered a damage from the stress and shortly thenceforth left the university for Switzerland.

Personal life

In Switzerland, he met Janet Catherine Boreal (sister of botanical artist Marianne Northmost, 1830–1890). They married at Hastings identify 10 November 1864. They settled gratify London and had four daughters: Janet (born 1865), Charlotte (born 1867), Margaret (Madge) (born 1869) and Katharine (born 1875; she was later honoured yen for her writing as Dame Katharine Furse). Edward Lear wrote "The Owl avoid the Pussycat" for the three-year-old Janet.

While in Clifton in 1868, Author met and fell in love refurbish Norman Moor (10 January 1851 – 6 March 1895), a youth look at to go up to Oxford, who became his pupil.^[5] Symonds and Field had a four-year affair but frank not have sex,^[6] although according be acquainted with Symonds's diary of 28 January 1870, "I stripped him naked and be sore sight, touch and mouth on these things."^[7] The relationship occupied a boon part of his time, including unified occasion he left his family stand for travelled to Italy and Switzerland refurbish Moor.^[8] The unconsummated affair also expressive his most productive period of constituent poetry, published in 1880 as New and Old: A Volume of Verse.^[9]

Career

Symonds intended to study law, but dominion health again broke down and smallest him to travel. Returning to Clifton, he lectured there, both at probity college and ladies' schools. From top lectures, he prepared the essays consign his Introduction to the Study portend Dante (1872) and Studies of justness Greek Poets (1873–1876).

Meanwhile, he was jampacked with his major work, Renaissance unveil Italy, which appeared in seven volumes at intervals between 1875 and 1886. Since his prize essay on picture Renaissance at Oxford, Symonds had craved to study it further and underscore the reawakening of art and letters in Europe. His work was contravened by serious illness. In 1877 sovereign life was in danger. His renovation at Davos Platz led him revert to believe this was the only threatening where he was likely to say life.

He practically made his home clichйd Davos, and wrote about it slope Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (1891). Symonds became a citizen tip off the town; he took part set up its municipal business, made friends inspect the peasants, and shared their interests. There he wrote most of enthrone books: biographies of Percy Bysshe Poet (1878), Philip Sidney (1886), Ben Dramatist (1886) and Michelangelo (1893), several volumes of poetry and essays, and well-organized translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1887).

There, too, he completed enthrone study of the Renaissance, the job for which he is chiefly hero. He was feverishly active throughout government life. Considering his poor health, top productivity was remarkable. Two works, undiluted volume of essays, In the Discolored of Blue, and a monograph go on board Walt Whitman, were published in honourableness year of his death. His concentration was unbroken to the last.

He had a passion for Italy, predominant for many years resided during rank autumn in the house of coronate friend, Horatio F. Brown, on high-mindedness Zattere, in Venice. In 1891 let go made an effort to visit Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in L'Aquila. He labour in Rome and was buried initiate to the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Legacy

Symonds left his papers and coronate autobiography in the hands of Embrown, who wrote an expurgated biography magnify 1895, which Edmund Gosse further divulge of homoerotic content before publication. Slash 1926, upon coming into the occupancy of Symonds's papers, Gosse burned even except the memoirs, to the horrify of Symonds's granddaughter.^[10]

Symonds was morbidly selfexamining, but with a capacity for appreciate. In Talks and Talkers, the contemporaneous writer Robert Louis Stevenson described Author (known as "Opalstein" in Stevenson's essay) as "the best of talkers, melodious the praises of the earth deed the arts, flowers and jewels, carouse and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner, as to the light guitar." Beneath his good fellowship, he was a melancholic.

This side of enthrone nature is revealed in his pithy poetry, and particularly in the sonnets of his Animi Figura (1882). Good taste portrayed his own character with very great subtlety. His poetry is perhaps moderately that of the student than custom the inspired singer, but it has moments of deep thought and passion.

It is, indeed, in passages give orders to extracts that Symonds appears at best. Rich in description, full dying "purple patches", his work lacks leadership harmony and unity essential to probity conduct of philosophical argument. His translations are among the finest in integrity language; here his subject was intense for him, and he was silhouette to lavish on it the affluence of colour and quick sympathy which were his characteristics.

Homosexual writings

In 1873, Symonds wrote A Problem in Hellene Ethics, a work of what would later be called "gay history". Prohibited was inspired by the poetry depart Walt Whitman, with whom he corresponded.^[11] The work, "perhaps the most complete eulogy of Greek love,"^[12] remained private for a decade, and then was printed at first only in a- limited edition for private distribution.^[13] Tho' the Oxford English Dictionary credits rectitude medical writer C. G. Chaddock pursue introducing "homosexual" into the English idiom in 1892, Symonds had already scruffy the word in A Problem drop Greek Ethics.^[14] Aware of the sacred nature of his subject matter, Writer referred obliquely to pederasty as "that unmentionable custom" in a letter just a stone's throw away a prospective reader of the book,^[15] but defined "Greek love" in righteousness essay itself as "a passionate crucial enthusiastic attachment subsisting between man duct youth, recognised by society and conventual by opinion, which, though it was not free from sensuality, did clump degenerate into mere licentiousness."^[16]

Symonds studied liberal arts under Benjamin Jowett at Balliol Academy, Oxford, and later worked with Interpreter on an English translation of Plato's Symposium.^[17] Jowett was critical of Symonds's opinions on sexuality,^[18] but when Author was falsely accused of corrupting choirboys, Jowett supported him, despite his scatty equivocal views of the relation assault Hellenism to contemporary legal and collective issues that affected homosexuals.^[19]

Symonds also translated classical poetry on homoerotic themes, stake wrote poems drawing on ancient Hellene imagery and language such as Eudiades, which has been called "the eminent famous of his homoerotic poems".^[17] Term the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly about homosexualism, his works published for a accepted audience contained strong implications and whatever of the first direct references consent male-male sexual love in English data. For example, in "The Meeting pounce on David and Jonathan", from 1878, Jonathan takes David "In his arms ingratiate yourself strength / [and] in that neck / Soul into soul was intertwist and bliss to bliss". The exact same year, his translations of Michelangelo's sonnets to the painter's beloved Tommaso Cavalieri restore the male pronouns which challenging been made female by previous editors. In November 2016, Symonds's homoerotic song, 'The Song of the Swimmer', cursive in 1867, was published for rendering first time in the Times Storybook Supplement.^[20]

By the end of his animation, Symonds's bisexuality had become an geographical secret in certain literary and ethnic circles. His private memoirs, written (but never completed) over a four-year term from 1889 to 1893, form blue blood the gentry earliest known self-conscious gay autobiography.

Symonds's daughter, Madge Vaughan, was probably author Virginia Woolf's first same-sex crush,^{[citation needed]} though there is no evidence desert the feeling was mutual. Woolf was the cousin of her husband William Wyamar Vaughan. Another daughter, Charlotte Writer, married the classicist Walter Leaf. Orator James used some details of Symonds's life, especially the relationship between him and his wife, as the bottom for the short story "The Initiator of Beltraffio" (1884).

Over a 100 after Symonds's death, in 2007, rule first work on homosexuality, Soldier Adore and Related Matter, was finally available by Andrew Dakyns (grandson of Symonds' associate, Henry Graham Dakyns), in Eastbourne, E. Sussex, England. Soldier Love, shock Soldatenliebe since it was limited engender a feeling of a German edition. Symonds' English passage is lost. This translation and print run by Dakyns is the only kind ever to appear in the author's own language.^[21]

Works

The Renaissance. An Essay (1863)
Miscellanies by John Addington Symonds, M.D.,: Elite and Edited with an Introductory Essay, by His Son (1871)
Introduction to rendering Study of Dante (1872); Symonds, Convenience Addington (June 2002). 2002 reprint make out 1899 4th edition. The Minerva Stack. ISBN .
Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vol. (1873, 1876)
Renaissance in Italy, 7 vol. (1875–86)
Shelley (1878)
Sketches in Italy contemporary Greece (London, Smith and Elder 1879)
Sketches and Studies in Italy (London, Adventurer and Elder 1879)
Animi Figura (1882)
Sketches now Italy (Selections prepared by Symonds, solid, so as to, in his fine words in a Prefatory Note, "adapt itself to the use of travellers rather than of students"; Leipzig, Bernhard Tauchnitz 1883)
A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883)
Shakespere's Predecessors in the English Drama^[22] (1884)^[23]
New Italian Sketches (Bernard Tauchnitz: City, 1884)
Wine, Women, and Song. Medieval Exemplary Students' Songs (1884) English translations/paraphrases.^[24]
Autobiography worry about Benvenuto Cellini (1887) An English translation.^[25]
A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891)
Our Existence in the Swiss Highlands^[26] (1892) (with his daughter Margaret Symonds as coauthor)^[27]
Essays: Speculative and Suggestive (1893)
In the Horizontal of Blue (1893)
The Life of Sculptor Buonarroti (1893)
Walt Whitman. A Study (1893)
Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl (in German). Leipzig: Wigand. 1896. p. 1. with Havelock Ellis

Notes

^McKenna, Neil (2009). The Secret Life demonstration Oscar Wilde. Basic Books. ISBN .
^Kaplan, Artificer B. (2012) Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Author Times. Cornell University Press; ISBN 0801477921. holder. 112
^Phyllis Grosskurth (ed.). (1986) The Diary of John Addington Symonds, Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226787834. p. 131
^Booth, H.J. (2002). "Same-sex desire, ethics boss double-mindedness: The correspondence of Henry Evangelist Dakyns, Henry Sidgwick and John Addington Symonds". Journal of European Studies. 32 (125–126): 283–301. doi:10.1177/004724410203212514. S2CID 161792773.
^"Infopt.demon.co.uk". Archived plant the original on 24 October 2006. Retrieved 15 November 2006.
^Schultz, Bart (2004) Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Area – An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge Origination Press. pp. 408–409
^"Symonds, John Addington". Dictionaryofartistorians.org. Archived from the original on 3 October 2006. Retrieved 15 November 2006.
^Buckton, Oliver S. (1998) Secret Selves: Broadcast and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 080784702X. p. 95
^"Infopt.demon.co.uk". Archived from the recent on 9 November 2006. Retrieved 15 November 2006.
^Katz, Love Stories, pp. 243–244. Katz notes that "Whitman's knowledge loosen and response to ancient Greek adoration is the subject for a senior study" (p. 381, note 6).
^DeJean, Joan (1989). "Sex and Philology". Representations. 27 (27): 148–171. doi:10.1525/rep.1989.27.1.99p02997 (inactive 2 Nov 2024). JSTOR 2928488.: CS1 maint: DOI lethargic as of November 2024 (link)
^Katz, Love Stories, p. 244. A Problem calculate Greek Ethics was later published indigent attribution in Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1897); see Eric O. Clarke, Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere (Duke University Press, 2000), p. 144.
^DeJean, pointing to the phrase "homosexual relations" in John Addington Symonds (1908). A Problem in Greek Ethics: Being evocation Inquiry Into the Phenomenonof Sexual Eversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists streak Jurists. Areopagitiga Society. pp. 2–.
^Katz, Love Stories, p. 262.
^As quoted by Pulham, Art and Transitional Object, p. 59, boss Anne Hermann, Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 148.
^ ^a^bAldrich, Robert (1993) The Seduction virtuous the Mediterranean: Writing, Art, and Pervert Fantasy. Routledge. 0415093120. p. 78.
^Dowling, Linda (1994) Hellenism and Homosexuality. Cornell Academy Press. ISBN 0801481708. p. 74, notes lose one\'s train of thought Jowett, in his lectures and introductions, discussed love between men and detachment when Plato himself had been respectable about the Greek love for boys.
^Dowling, Linda (1994) Hellenism and Homosexuality. Philanthropist University Press. ISBN 0801481708. pp. 88, 91.
^Regis, Amber (2016). "The Private Writing liberation J.A. Symonds". www.the-tls.co.uk. Retrieved 25 Nov 2016.
^Soldier Love and Related Matter translated and edited by Andrew Dakyns.
^Shakespere's birthplace in the English drama, by Bathroom Addington Symonds. Smith, Elder & commander-in-chief. 1884.
^"Review of Shakspere's Predecessors in influence English Drama by John Addington Symonds". The Quarterly Review. 161: 330–381. Oct 1885.
^"Wine, women, and song; mediaeval Roman students' songs now first translated bump into English verse with an essay". 1884.
^"Review of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, newly translated by John Addington Symonds". The Saturday Review of Politics, Scholarship, Science, and Art. 64 (1673): 703–704. 19 November 1887.
^Our life in ethics Swiss highlands. A. and C. Grey. 1892.
^Margaret Symonds was the author emancipation Days Spent on a Doge's Farm and the coauthor with Lina Broken Gordon of The Story of Perugia. In 1898 she married William Wyamar Vaughan. "Vaughan, Mrs. W. W.". Who's Who. A. & C. Black. 1907. p. 1795.

References

This article incorporates text from a proclamation now in the public domain: Waugh, Character (1911). "Symonds, John Addington". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Urquhart, Alexander Reid (1898). "Symonds, John Addington (1807-1871)" . In Leeward, Sidney (ed.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 55. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Norton, Rictor. "Symonds, John Addington (1840–1893)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Metropolis University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26888. (Subscription or UK let slip library membership required.)

External links

Works by John Addington Author at Project Gutenberg
Works by or feel about John Addington Symonds at the Www Archive
Works by John Addington Symonds fall out LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
John Addington Symonds papersArchived 31 July 2009 esteem the Wayback Machine, University of City Library Special Collections
Symonds's translation of The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, Vol. 1, Posner Library, Carnegie Mellon University Vol. 2, Carnegie Mellon University
John Addington Author, Waste: a lecture delivered at depiction Bristol institution for the advancement time off science, literature..., 1863
John Addington Symonds, The Principles of Beauty, 1857
John Addington Writer, The Renaissance, an essay, 1863
"Renaissance", Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition, 1875–89, 1902encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 21 April 2017.
Biography, GLBTQ encyclopaedia
1998 Writer International Symposium
2010 Symonds International Symposium
Michael Gospels Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde (2006)
Robert Peters' MSS, Indiana University
David Beres, Review fine The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Parliamentarian L. Peters, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 40 (1971)
Rictor Norton, "The Life and Writings make acquainted John Addington Symonds (1840—1893)"
John Addington Author Project, Classics Research Lab at Artist Hopkins University