Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was an English socialist, poet, philosopher and anthologist, an early campaigner for gay rights and for prison reform. His free-verse sequence Towards Democracy appeared in 1883.

The pieces here are in the long, unrhymed lines of his free verse. The poems printed here are those given in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917), edited by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee; the text is taken from that anthology.