Uranian poetry

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The Uranians were a small and somewhat clandestine group of pederastic poets (many of whom were university graduates of Oxford or Cambridge) in England who wrote between 1870 and 1930. The group's name derives, in part, from the Platonic theory of "heavenly" or "Uranian" pederasty. Their work was characterized by an idealised appeal to the history of Ancient Greece and a sentimental infatuation for pubescent (or nearly pubescent) boys, as well as by a use of conservative verse forms.

The chief poets of this clique were William Johnson, Lord Alfred Douglas, John Gambril Nicholson, Rev. E. E. Bradford, John Addington Symonds, Edmund John, Fabian S. Woodley, and several other pseudonymous authors such as "Philebus" and "A. Newman". The flamboyantly eccentric novelist Frederick Rolfe (also known as "Baron Corvo") was a unifying presence in their social network, both within and without Venice. The fame of their work was limited by late Victorian and Edwardian taboos, by the extremely small editions (often privately printed) in which their verse was promulgated, and by the generally saccharine nature of their poetry. However, historian Niel McKenna has argued that Uranian poetry had a central role in the upper-class homosexual subcultures of the Victorian period, insisting that poetry was the main medium through which writers like Oscar Wilde, George Ives and Rennell Rodd sought to challenge the prejudices of the age.

Marginally associated with their world were more famous writers such as Edward Carpenter, as well as the obscure but prophetic poet-printer Ralph Chubb, with his majestic lithographic volumes celebrating the boy as an Ideal. The Uranian quest to revive the Greek notion of paiderastia was not successful; later gay poets would look instead to the androphilic inspiration of Walt Whitman and A. E. Housman, though a number of writers, such as E. M. Forster, handle the same themes in a Modernist way, as he does in several of his posthumously published stories, such as "The Torque"[1].

The only book-length study of the Uranians is Love In Earnest by Timothy d'Arch Smith (1970)[2], though critics such as Richard Dellamora (Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, 1990 [3]) and Linda Dowling (Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, 1994 [4]) have contributed more recently to the scant knowledge about this group. As with larger aesthetic movements, canonicity issues have even reached the Uranians, as with a recent article by Michael Kaylor ("Beautiful Dripping Fragments", Victorian Poetry, 40.2, 2002 [5]), which situates Gerard Manley Hopkins rather squarely within this group. Paul Fussell discusses Uranian poetry in his book The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), suggesting that it provided a model for homoerotic representations in the war poets of World War One (e.g. Wilfred Owen).