SOURCE: "'Descend, and Touch, and Enter': Tennyson's Strange Manner of Address," in Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850-1920, University of California Press, 1994, pp. 44-70.

In the following chapter from his book, Craft studies Tennyson's In Memoriam as a document of homosexual desire, looking at the poem in relation to its social context and contemporary notions of sexuality.

In the final chapter of Sexual Inversion, Havelock Ellis turns with measured circumspection to the difficult problem of the correction and consolation of the sexual invert. In the especially vexed case of the "congenital invert"—in the case, that is, of a person who is the "victim of abnormal [homosexual] impulses" that spring incorrigibly from "the central core of organic personality"—consolation through sublimation provides the only available palliation; and this because the invert's "inborn constitutional abnormality" remains, by definition, nonductile and fundamentally resistant to "psychotherapeutical...