Teach your children well…
“Good day, perverts!”
“A collection of the world’s finest academic writing”: Thanks, Textbooks.
Both?!?
This tip if not that helpful
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As we leave no child behind, we might recall that it was on this date in 1871 that Dante Gabriel Rossetti responded to the anonymous attack on his work, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” by publishing “The Stealthy School of Criticism” in Athenaeum (and later, as pictured below, in pamphlet form)…
…Here is a full-grown man, presumably intelligent and cultivated, putting on record for other full-grown men to read, the most secret mysteries of sexual connection, and that with so sickening a desire to reproduce the sensual mood . . . that we merely shudder at the shameless nakedness. We are no purists in such matters . . . but it is neither poetic, nor manly, nor even human, to obtrude such things as themes of whole poems. It is simply nasty.
– from “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” by “Thomas Maitland” (later revealed to be Scottish poet Robert Buchanan)
[The accusation] is not against the poetic value of certain work, but against its primary and (by assumption) its admitted aim. And to this I must reply that so far, assuredly, not even Shakespeare himself could desire more arduous human tragedy for development in Art than belongs to the themes I venture to embody, however incalculably higher might be his power of dealing with them…
Who will then fail to discern all the palpitations which preceded his final resolve in the great question whether to be or not to be his acknowledged self when he became an assailant? And yet this is he who, from behind his mask, ventures to charge another with “bad blood,” with “insincerity,” and the rest of it (and that where poetic fancies are alone in question); while every word on his own tongue is covert rancour, and every stroke from his pen perversion of truth.
– from “The Stealthy School of Criticism”
Cat fight!
