Narcissus and Other Poems (1873)

Brief Description: This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Contributor Bio:  Carpenter, Edward Edward Carpenter (29 August 1844 - 28 June 1929) was an English socialist poet, socialist philosopher, anthologist, and early gay activist. A leading figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Besant, Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J. K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E D Morel, William Morris, E R Pease, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. As a philosopher he is particularly known for his publication of Civilization, Its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilization is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilizations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilization successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud and Wilfred Trotter who all recognised that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual that can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia. An early advocate of sexual freedoms, he had a profound influence on both D. H. Lawrence and Aurobindo, and inspired E. M. Forster's novel Maurice.