6 - Edward Carpenter: Towards Democracy – The Greatest Poet England Never Had

Summary

For one reason or another, every country takes its spiritual lead from a poet who represents a particular age. It may be for a century, such as Alexander Pope in the eighteenth. Or it may be for a longer period, such is Shakespeare's 400 year reign; or it may be shorter, as with Wordsworth's 40 or so years. In the early twentieth century, England looked to T.S. Eliot, the self-confessing Catholic, Classicist and Conservative. But for England to take to its heart an American poet required quite some act of forgetting of the origins of the voice of its spiritual conscience. But the choice was not made for want of eligible English poets. The role of spiritual guide in the early twentieth century might well be argued, as this chapter will argue, to have been Edward Carpenter, although his influence was disguised because of his triple handicap of being Atheist, Homosexual and Socialist.

In this chapter I want to explore Carpenter's always faltering reputation, not as some act designed to induce pain in the homosexual reader, but in order to introduce Carpenter's work – once more – to gay people who can but find it exhilarating and uplifting. I choose the word ‘exhilarating’ because it exactly captures the feeling I had when first reading Carpenter's verse which filled me with so much excitement that I wanted to explode with joy for what I am and have always been – recognizing myself in Carpenter's verse and prose as though for the first time.