Early announcement of a new book, Aleister Crowley – Early Poetic Works – Edited, Annotated and Introduced by Christian Giudice.

Aleister Crowley is beyond doubt the most influential occultist of the 20th century. While he is hailed as one of the giants of the esoteric sciences, very little attention has been devoted to Crowley’s years as a Cambridge undergraduate (1895 –1898), when the author wrote and published an incredible amount of verse: this poetry, firmly planted within the vogue of the day, tells the tale of his doomed love affair with actor and female impersonator Jerome Pollitt and of his first steps towards occult sciences.



The two themes of homosexual love and spiritual yearning paint a magnificent picture of a taboo breaking poet, right when these twin pivotal ideas were just budding.



The four works included in this anthology of early poetic production are Aceldama: A Place to Bury Strangers In, Jezebel and Other Tragic Poems, Songs of the Spirit and The Tale of Archais: A Romance in Verse. In these verses, the reader will find many facets of the young Crowley: echoes of Oscar Wilde, the tortured homosexual lover; W.B. Yeats, the seeker of spiritual truths; Arthur Symons, the prurient Decadent poet; and A.C. Swinburne, the searcher of masochistic adventures and forbidden pleasures.