Uranian poetry

The Uranians were a small and somewhat clandestine group of male pederastic poets who published works between 1858 (when William Johnson Cory published Ionica) and 1930. Although most of them were English, they had counterparts in the United States and France.

Their name is commonly believed to derive from the work of the German theorist and campaigner Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s, with the name later taken up by John Addington Symonds and others who rendered it as 'Uranian'. However, it has been argued that this derivation and coinage, at least for the English-speaking countries, is independent of Ulrichs's "coinage". In his work Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Michael M. Kaylor writes:

Given that the prominent Uranians were trained Classicists, I consider ludicrous the view, widely held, that ‘Uranian’ derives from the German apologias and legal appeals written by Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s, though his coinage Urning — employed to denote ‘a female psyche in a male body’ — does indeed derive from the same Classical sources, particularly the Symposium. Further, the Uranians did not consider themselves the possessors of a ‘female psyche’; the Uranians are not known, as a group, to have read works such as Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Research on the Riddle of Male-Male Love); the Uranians were opposed to Ulrichs’s claims for androphilic, homoerotic liberation at the expense of the paederastic; and, even when a connection was drawn to such Germanic ideas and terminology, it appeared long after the term ‘Uranian’ had become commonplace within Uranian circles, hence was not a ‘borrowing from’ but a ‘bridge to’ the like-minded across the Channel by apologists such as Symonds. (p. xiii, footnote)

The work of the Uranian poets was characterized by an idealised appeal to the history of Ancient Greece and a sentimental infatuation of older men for adolescent boys, as well as by a use of conservative verse forms.

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