John Addington Symonds

From Philosopedia

Symonds, John Addington (5 October 1840 - 19 April 1893)

Symonds was an English poet and author, the son of an eminent physician. Because he suffered from tuberculosis, he spent much of his life in Italy and Switzerland. In his work, Symonds scoffed at the idea that the Renaissance artists owed their excellence to religious inspiration. Symonds’s largest work was Renaissance in Italy (1875–1886, 7 volumes), but he wrote volumes on Jonson, Sidney, Shelley, Whitman, and Michelangelo. In addition he translated the autobiography of Cellini and much Greek and Italian poetry. Among his wide circle of literary friends were Lear, Swinburne, Stephen, and Stevenson.

Although his father had taught him that the love of men was evil, Symonds became infatuated with one choirboy after another while a fellow at Magdalen College, and he suffered several nervous breakdowns. In Switzerland, where he moved, he found that homosexuality was not a crime and one could admire the human body more openly than in England. Symonds was much attracted by the Hellenism of the Renaissance, and both his prose and poetry show his concept of Platonic love and his admiration for male beauty. Although he married in 1864, he acknowledged his homosexuality and campaigned, discreetly, for legal reform and more outspoken recognition of homosexuality as being a congenital condition. After siring four daughters, he arrived at a liberal understanding with his wife which allowed him the sexual freedom he craved.

“We maintain,” he wrote as a homosexual, “that we have the right to exist after the fashion which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison—as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality.”

Symonds wrote a monograph on Walt Whitman, and in his translations of Michelangelo's sonnets to the painter's beloved Tommaso Cavalieri, he returned the male pronouns that had been heterosexualized by previous editors into female pronouns.

He also wrote in his Memoirs (1890), “I can also defend, on what appears to me sufficient grounds, a large amount of promiscuity. In the very nature of the sexual contract between two males there inheres an element of instability. No children come of the connection. There can be no marriage ceremonies, no marriage settlements, no married life in common. Therefore, the parties are free, and the sexual flower of comradeship may spring afresh for each of them wherever favourable soil is found.”

H. D. Brown, one of his biographers, wrote that Symonds rejected not only Christianity but also any belief in a future life.

(See entry for Gay Philosophers.)

{BDF; CE; GL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}