That One Word

Abstract This chapter sets the stage for those to come by re-evaluating some puzzling lines by Symonds’s distant kinsman (and important influence), Lord Byron. Describing, in verse, a storm over Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, Byron laments his inability to achieve similarly lightning-like expression of his desires, longing for “that one word” that will provide release. The recent reader who knows something of Byron’s sex life inevitably wonders if this a frustrated “coming-out” scene. But there may be better questions to ask than how Byron might have gone about expressing himself, had he only had access to words yet to be coined (such as “homosexual,” later introduced into English print by Symonds). Whatever Byron’s desires were, the self-expression of Symonds and others would occupy precisely the kind of space carved out by those verses in Geneva: that of a self so deep and intense that its expression would have the sublimity of lightning.