“I give my white-skinned boy a pearl
Fair as his body and as strange
As still pools veiled in mists that change
Their mysteries as they wreathe and curl:
— So that his visions ever be
Wondrous and subtle as the sea,
I give my white-skinned boy a pearl.”

This verse comes from The Seven Gifts by Edmund John, published in the May 1916 edition of The English Review. It was introduced with the following note: “Suggested by the fragment of a letter from an Athenian father to his son, in the time of Pericles, now in the possession of Sydney Oswald, Esqre.”

The note was almost certainly fiction—an artful screen to disguise the real impulse behind the poem. Edmund John liked writing about boys.

One of Britain’s most obscure poets, Edmund John (1883–1917) was never afforded the opportunity to establish a reputation. His premature death at thirty-three ensured that his name would slip quietly into obscurity. Only three volumes of poetry were published: The Flute of Sardonyx (1913), The Wind in the Temple (1915), and the posthumous Symphonie Symbolique (1919). Today, he is largely forgotten, his small but striking body of work almost entirely overlooked.

John was born in Woolwich on 27 November 1883 to a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. He studied science—particularly biology and chemistry—before turning to philosophy. With his brother, he ran a boys’ school in Crouch End, supplementing his income by coaching undergraduates.

Travel appears to have played an important role in his development as a poet. The introduction to Symphonie Symbolique suggests that Cuba left a lasting impression:

“Where the glowing colours of the South, the luxuriance of the tropics, provided his palette with a richness that it did not possess before, and gave to his verse an almost exotic warmth and splendour.”

His first book of poetry, The Flute of Sardonyx, gained immediate notoriety upon publication. Critics were, for the most part, receptive—perhaps because many failed to grasp its implications. One who did not was James Douglas, a prominent literary critic, who launched a fierce attack on both Edmund John and Stephen Williams, author of the book’s introduction.

“Williams in the introduction of The Flute of Sardonyx seeks to justify or excuse these poems by citing Milton’s definition of poetry, and he implies that Milton meant by the word ‘sensuous’ not merely the normal, healthy, and wholesome senses of the normal, healthy, and wholesome human being, but also the debased, depraved and degraded sensations of a perverted and abnormal erotomania. I have not the slightest doubt that in a court of law an English jury and an English judge would not hesitate to condemn Mr John as being guilty of a gross offence against elementary propriety. I demand without delay the volume should be withdrawn in deference to what I believe to the inevitable and inexorable verdict of public opinion.”

One poem in particular, Salome, provoked Douglas’s outrage.

“These stanzas, I venture to affirm, are of a vileness hitherto unparalleled in English poetry. Nothing approximating to or of approaching depravity has, as far as I am aware, ever been tolerated in English literature.”

Others were scarcely more forgiving. A. E. Manning Foster, writing in The Bookmarker, observed:

“Salome is an Aubrey Beardsley picture in words, and yet it is not entirely pleasing. Mr John brings into his poem what Oscar Wilde in his play on Salome and Flaubert in his short story never did—an unhealthy, perverted strain.”

Herbert Jenkins, John’s publisher, abruptly withdrew The Flute of the Sardonyx, later reissuing it in a revised edition that was, as one commentator noted, “meeker than the Shakespeare we use at school.”

One of the few surviving biographical sketches of Edmund John appears in George Norman Douglas’s memoir Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion (1933).

“We met through his sending verses to The English Review after the publication of The Flute of Sardonyx, and it often struck me how greatly his person resembled his writings—sensuous and ornate, elaborate in manner, a little over-dressed, too many rings and tiepins, too much thought expended upon the colour of socks. He would have grown out of these incongruities had he lived. Meanwhile he was young and handsome.

“He could drink like a fish and remain perfectly sober. In those days I bought my whisky in kegs, and it was alarming to see how he could put it away. Good company! At such moments he cast off that veil of precocity, though a certain refinement always clung to him; it was part of his nature.”

John’s second volume, The Wind in the Temple, published in 1915, was widely praised.

“The superb loveliness of these stanzas are beyond praise,” wrote the Westminster Gazette. “Seldom has the enhancing beauty of Greek thought so captivated the soul of a poet; seldom has this enchantment been rendered so felicitously in modern verse.” The Evening Standard noted: “Although owing much to Arthur Symons, these poems have a magic all their own, for Mr John knows the value of the leash, the most difficult of all lessons to be learnt.”

Around this time, John enlisted in the 28th (London) Battalion, the Artist’s Rifles, to fight in the First World War. Founded in 1859 amid fears of a French invasion, the regiment attracted volunteers from public schools, universities, and the creative professions—painters, musicians, actors, architects.

John’s death in 1917 might easily be assumed to have been a casualty of war. Douglas, however, suggests otherwise.

“In his correspondence he told me that he had been invalided out of the army (in 1916) on account of his heart. He had also married for money, as he frankly confessed. His tastes were luxurious; coaching, and an occasional volume of verse would never make him feel at ease. It looked as if all were going well, yet I did not like the nervous tones of his letters….”

Seeking to recover his health, John travelled to Italy and settled in Taormina.

“It is a site of great distances—its soft colouring—its streets hushed at noonday as by some weird enchantment—its leaning walls in flower—its secluded gardens—its terraces—its lemon and almond groves; its crystal air, crystal and flare at noon, opal and pearl at either edge of the day; its castled crests and crumbling ruins.”

An obituary followed:

“On the 28th February (1917), at Taormina, Sicily, Edmund John, of heart failure, beloved husband of Kate Dalliba John, of Florence, and dearly loved eldest son of Thomas and Margaret John of 20 Cranley Gardens, London, aged thirty-three.”

Douglas corrected the record bluntly:

“I replied to John’s letter on the 19th of February 1917. On the 28th of the same month he killed himself. A miserable ending of which he seemed to have had a presentiment.”

From this point onward, certainty dissolves. The dead do not speak, and what remains is conjecture.

Certainly, John suffered from a debilitating heart condition and bouts of depression. But other forces may have contributed.

“Ah God, it was the Hope gave to me,
Within the womb, of things unknown and fair,
The Bud that blossomed into this Despair.
Art Thou content, O God, with thus Thy work?
Art Thou content that Thou hast planned so well?
That Thy cold hands have thrust me into Hell?”

John’s poetry is suffused with Uranian themes—a term coined in the nineteenth century by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, before the invention of the word homosexual.

“His eyes are brothers to the sun and sky,
His body’s fragrance haunts the murmuring wood,
And all the flowers are singing where he stood,
And all the leaves are chanting their reply.”

In The Wind in the Temple, love is repeatedly figured as adolescent beauty.

“His body is like milk edged with rose-colour rare,
With vine and lure of hemlock in his red-gold hair,
Night-kissed, that burns and gleams;
His grave sweet scarlet lips are parted voicelessly,
His eyes like stars reflected in a violet sea
Of dawn and dreams.”

And elsewhere:

“Harder, press harder with your scarlet mouth;
Lie close, limbs woven of the passionate South;
Twine nearer, subtle satin limbs of June,
Burn your gold scented body into mine,
Cling to my lips with yours of Graecian wine,
Cling closer till the blood come and life swoon…”

Yes, Edmund John was a Uranian poet, and he harboured pederastic desires. Men and Boys (1924) reproduced part of a letter he wrote to a “young friend”:

“I have received your adorable, illustrated letter this morning and loved it so much I immediately made an altar before it, lit by amber candles in copper candlesticks, burnt incense before it and kissed its extreme beautifulness.”

Did his homosexuality weigh heavily upon him?

That John died in Taormina is suggestive. Long regarded as a “Queer Eden” for artists and intellectuals, the town was famed for its beauty, Greek mystique, and relative tolerance—an atmosphere reinforced by Wilhelm von Gloeden’s homoerotic photographs of local youths. Oscar Wilde and André Gide had passed through; later visitors would include Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Jean Cocteau, Thomas Mann, Somerset Maugham, and Roger Peyrefitte.

There is also the unresolved mystery of John’s marriage to Kate Dalliba, reportedly solemnised in Florence.

“Kate Dalliba, of St. John’s Wood. Famous for her Sunday night salon, referred to as The House of Music. Wealthy musicians in evening dress rub shoulders with poor and budding young geniuses in wrinkled light clothes and soiled linen. All here is democracy, art, Bohemianism.”

Born into a wealthy family in Cleveland, Ohio, Dalliba used her fortune to support artists such as Ezra Pound, Ida Rubinstein, Olga Rudge, and Ildebrando Pizzetti. She lived in Florence and maintained her London house as a free lodging and performance space for travelling musicians and artists.

It is entirely possible that John, described by George Norman Douglas as being poor, was drawn to her wealth. He had openly admitted that he married her for money. The rich older woman and the handsome young poet might have passed, outwardly, as a conventional May–December match.

Whether Dalliba later recognised the truth of the arrangement—and whether this recognition had consequences for John—remains unknown. She herself lost most of her fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

What remains is a handful of poems, a scandal, a life cut short, and the faint outline of a gifted, troubled poet whose voice—sensuous, excessive, and dangerous—proved too much for his time.