John Addington Symonds

Walt Whitman. a Study (1893). by John Addington Symonds

John Addington Symonds 5 October 1840 - 19 April 1893) 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 he married and had a family, he was an early advocate of male love (homosexuality), which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible (love of the impossible). He also wrote much poetry inspired by his homosexual affairs. Symonds was born at Bristol, England in 1840. His father, the senior John Addington Symonds, M. D. (1807-1871), was the author of Criminal Responsibility (1869), The Principles of Beauty (1857) and Sleep and Dreams. Considered delicate, the younger Symonds did not take part in games after age 14 at Harrow School, and he showed no particular promise as a scholar. Symonds's mother died when he was only four years old, and his father had a powerful influence upon the formation of his character. The fashionable Freudian theory that a man's homosexuality is caused by a close-binding-intimate mother and a weak-or-absent father is put to rout by Symonds's childhood, in which the opposite was the case.