Wilson Collection: Edward Carpenter

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Carpenter.jpg

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(Frontis portrait of Edward Carpenter from Towards Democracy: Complete Edition in Four Parts; London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Limited / Manchester: S. Clarke, 1907. Also shown is the title page from Love’s Coming of Age, 1911)

Edward Carpenter

After visiting Walt Whitman, English Socialist Edward Carpenter concluded that the Poet “was before all a lover of the Male.”[1]

For Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, Carpenter's Ioläus “opened up for me soul windows.”[2] And a peek into The Intermediate Sex was for liberationist Harry Hay an “earthshaking revelation.”[3]

In Love's Coming of Age (1896) Carpenter wrote, “Love is...its own justification.”[4] However various its “combinations,” “only in the most exceptional cases, if at all, may public institutions venture to interfere with” it.[5]

References

  1. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 365.
  2. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 284.
  3. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston:Alyson Publications, 1990), 27.
  4. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1911), 155.
  5. Carpenter, 155.


To return to "Exhibit contents" links, click:

Rich Wilson: Aspects of Queer Existence in 19th-Century America

See also:

Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman: 1868-1922

Jonathan Ned Katz: "Gavin Arthur Recalls Edward Carpenter," 1967

Whitman, Symonds, Carpenter: "In paths untrodden," 1859-1924

Jonathan Ned Katz: Resistance: 1859-1972

John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, and Walt Whitman: 1892-1893