White Stains
Decadent Victorian Verse of Erotic Obsession, Sacrilege, Forbidden Desire, and Psychological TransgressionBy Aleister Crowley
Length2h 3m
About this audiobook
Published in 1898 under the pseudonym George Archibald Bishop, *White Stains* is a deliberately transgressive collection of poems and prose pieces concerned with erotic desire, bodily experience, perversity, death, and the limits of respectable expression. Its title signals the book's central strategy: to expose what Victorian culture attempted to conceal, while transforming taboo subject matter into literary experiment. Crowley moves among lyric meditation, dramatic monologue, parody, and macabre fantasy, drawing on decadent aesthetics, Symbolist suggestiveness, and the luxuriant diction of fin-de-siècle verse. The result is less a conventional volume of erotic poetry than a challenge to prevailing assumptions about morality, authorship, and artistic decorum. Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) wrote *White Stains* during the formative period in which he was establishing himself as a poet, mountaineer, occultist, and provocateur. Educated at Cambridge and influenced by Romantic, Decadent, and Symbolist writers, he regarded literary production as an instrument of intellectual and spiritual revolt. The pseudonymous publication allowed him to test censorship and social convention while developing the fascination with sexuality, ritual, and forbidden knowledge that would characterize his later occult writings. The volume therefore belongs both to Crowley's early poetic career and to his broader campaign against inherited systems of authority. Readers interested in fin-de-siècle literature, erotic modernism, censorship, or the relationship between art and occult self-fashioning will find *White Stains* especially rewarding. It should be approached as a historically situated work of provocation rather than merely as sensational verse: its excesses, ambiguities, and unevenness illuminate the cultural pressures it sought to resist. For those prepared to read beyond its scandalous reputation, the book offers a revealing portrait of Crowley's emerging aesthetic and of Victorian literature's hidden, rebellious margins.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 3.7 (423)
Includes Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon, StoryGraph
GenrePoetry
Length2 hrs 3 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateJul 15, 2021
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Psychology of Hashish (Annotated)
22Volupte
2Preface
23Rondels
3Dedicace
24Ad Lucium
4Prefatory
25A Paean in the Springtide
5A Fragment
26To J. L. D.
Show all chaptersShow less
6The Rainbow
27A Ballad of Passive Paederasty
7With a Copy of 'Poems and Ballads'
28Envoi
8Ad Lydiam, Ut Secum a Marito Fugeret
29To A.D.
9Contra Conjugium T.B.B.
30At Kiel
10A Ballad of Choosing
31Suggested Additional Stanzas For 'A Ballad of Burdens'
11Envoi
32The Blood-Lotus
12A Jealous Lover
33To My First-Born
13Ballade De La Jolie Marion
34Chant Au Saint-Esprit
14Envoi
35Victory
15At Stockholm
36Sleeping in Carthage
16Mathilde
37With Dog and Dame
17Yet Time to Turn
38Ερμαφροδιτον ‘Οναρ
18All Night
39'Erebus'
19Ode to Venus Callipgye
40La Juive
20Chorus
41Necrophilia
21Chorus
42Αβυσμος
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