#anyway thank you anon! i'm so unbelievably bored without a classroom to channel this in

[lesamis]

Please tell us about owen wilde and yourself!!!

happily, anon! i’m titling this over-long response “Literary Gay Crushes On Keats: The Wilde & Owen Feature”. 

wilde’s writing on keats is stunning. keats plays something of an odd role in gay literary iconography among english writers: he’s an object of desire as much as of identification; his appearance, the sensuality of his poetry, and his perpetually unfulfilled sexuality all provide obvious reasons for this. but wilde’s affection for keats was intensely personal. he writes that he loves keats, that much is easily said, but the list of attributes he provides is detailed, generous, and a little bit quirky. he even mentions the cat anecdote. 

differently put, wilde admires keats’s poetry in a literary sense, as his open appreciation of beauty fits right into the aesthetic movement, but he also sees it as an expression of youthful genius and sensual tenderness that resonates with him on a more personal level. he ascribes genuine beauty to keats himself, his character, his body. he was approached by keats’s niece, emma speed, when he toured america, and through her acquired access to some of keats’s manuscripts. thanking her, he writes: 

[…] now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery, for since my boyhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age, who knew the silver-footed messages of the moon, and the secret of the morning, who heard in Hyperion’s vale the large utterance of the early gods, and from the beechen plot the light-winged Dryad, who saw Madeline at the painted window, and Lamia in the house at Corinth, and Endymion ankle-deep in lilies of the vale, who drubbed the butcher’s boy for being a bully, and drank confusion to Newton for having analysed the rainbow. In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks, and it may be that some day he will lift “his hymenaeal curls from out his amber gleaming wine, | With ambrosial lips will kiss my forehead, clasp the hand of noble love in mine.”

Again I thank you for this dear memory of the man I love, and thank you also for the sweet and gracious words in which you give it to me: it were strange in truth if one in whose veins flows the same blood as quickened into song that young priest of beauty, were not with me in this great renaissance of art which Keats indeed would have so much loved, and of which he, above all others, is the seed.

he also wrote two sonnets, the grave of keats and on the sale by auction of keats’s love letters, as well as this essay in his memory. 

owen finds it similarly easy to identify with keats, but, i think, for different reasons. their lives were strangely parallel; they were born a century apart in the respective 90s of their age (keats 1795, owen 1893), died young, suffered much, and left remarkable literary legacies. keats’s influence is extremely obvious in owen’s earliest poems, some of which are literally about keats, like written in a wood, september 1910 (“Yet shall I see fair Keats, and hear his lyre”), or this sonnet. 

owen admired keats’s style and agreed with his philosophy, but keats was also an object of hero-worship and affection that translated directly to owen’s later love for sassoon. he writes to his mother about the strangeness of his own love for keats, as “to be in love with a youth and a dead-un is perhaps sillier than with a real, live maid”. in fact, if you read owen’s letters from this time and have also read keats’s from when he was a similar age, it’s really difficult not to get emotional about how similar they are in tone. owen was trying to trace keats’s path through england, seeking out locations where keats stayed in hampstead and teignmouth, in what he describes as a “pilgrimage”. keats did exactly the same in the footsteps of his own literary heroes a century earlier.

all this, then, is wrapped up in owen’s most famous letter to sassoon:

I held you as Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophis IV in profile.          What’s that mathematically?          In effect it is this: that I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least.

as opposed to wilde, to whom keats seems to have offered above all else aesthetic inspiration, i think to owen, keats was a source of comfort and security. this is why he recognises him in sassoon, who “fixed” his life: keats appears to have been something of a home to owen, a point of orientation, recognition, and safety. to which i can only say, from the bottom of my heart; well, fuck. 

(my own gay crush on keats, while utterly insignificant and also embarrassing, is still kind of a product of this same tradition: one that transfigures keats and has been doing so since shelley wrote adonais. keats had people who loved him dearly when he was alive; everything that came after is as much imagined as real. loving keats, as we do, after his death, is far more meaningful for each person who loves him than it could ever be for keats’s memory.)