ABSTRACT
The one late Victorian sequence which can hold its own alongside those of the Rossettis for scope as well as poetic strength and insight is John Addington Symonds's Animi Figura. As well as being the fullest and most sympathetic Victorian exploration of homosexuality in verse, it is an eloquent and highly intelligent engagement with the spiritual crises of its day, and a pioneering representation of the human mind which anticipates aspects of structuralism and analytic psychology. The poetic form and language of the sonnet sequence, which ultimately enabled Symonds to develop new structures for representing and comprehending the self, seemed at first a hindrance and a constraint. Reviewing Rossetti's Ballads and Sonnets in November 1881, Symonds wrote:
In spite of this published stance, Symonds was himself wrestling with 'the expression of a complicated philosophical subject' in his own sonnet sequences. By early February 1882, when his review was published in Macmillan's Magazine, Symonds was writing to his friend Horatio Brown that they were 'a very extraordinary collection, I think, now that I see them in sequence'. Only two weeks later he corrected himself, however, gloomily admitting that 'they have not the cohesion and organic force of a poem' and lamenting that 'it will now remain fragmentary, imperfect and obscure' (1967-69, vol.2, pp.728-31). This deadlock was broken by external intervention when Symonds showed his sonnets to Robert Louis Stevenson in March. Stevenson's role in the formation of Animi Figura is akin to Ezra Pound's in shaping The Waste Land. In his essay 'A Note on Realism', Stevenson insists that the literary artist take a ruthlessly editorial attitude to his own material:
Stevenson suggested the 'main design' of his sonnet sequences to Symonds, provided them with a title, and pushed for the exclusion of anything that did not fit. The result appeared in July 1882, while the excluded sonnets including the narrative sequence Stella Maris were published as Vagabunduli Libellus in 1884.
