Joseph Bristow

Aleister Crowley's Poetic Fin de Siècle: Swinburne's Legacy, Decadent Drag, and Spiritual Sex Magick

Victorian Literature and Culture January 1, 2021 Joseph Bristow

Aleister Crowley's undergraduate years at Cambridge in the late 1890s saw him develop an extreme form of decadent eroticism, driven by his desire to be seen as the main heir to Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry. His 1898 volume White Stains, privately circulated by Leonard Smithers, exemplifies this. Crowley later credited his sexual affair with Herbert Charles Pollitt, a celebrated aesthete and drag artist, with introducing him to English and French decadent writers. Pollitt's influence persisted into Crowley's 1910 work The Scented Garden of Abdullah the Satirist of Shiraz, which celebrates sodomy through an imagined Persian poet's voice, linking to Crowley's occult sex magick rituals.