John Addington Symonds Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Addington Symonds

In his 1878 biography of the English Romantic poet, John Addington Symonds wrote that the young Percy Bysshe Shelley's intellect and aesthetic sensibilities "sustained him at a perilous height above the ... race of man." The same could well be written of Symonds's own career. Though he is today a relatively obscure figure, especially in comparison to contemporaries such as Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde, he is, nevertheless, important for understanding the intellectual and moral climate of the later Victorian age. His biographies and other writings provide a window on nineteenth-century canons of taste; but, even more significantly, they tell much about Symonds's own struggle as a homosexual and religious skeptic at a time when neither was socially acceptable. His substantial body of public writing and his popular success mask considerable emotional turmoil as he, like Shelley, sought to reconcile his dreams and desires with the often-uncompromising social world of his day.

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