Cosmic Consciousness and the Love of Comrades: Contacts Between R.M. Bucke and Edward Carpenter

Abstract

The article documents the personal contacts and correspondence between the late nineteenth-century Canadian psychiatrist, R.M. Bucke, and the English poet and socialist, Edward Carpenter. Their correspondence shows Bucke’s consistent evasion of Carpenter’s invitation to discuss Walt Whitman’s poetry of same-sex desire, part of a pattern of denial in the early critical reception of Whitman’s work. Carpenter additionally seems to have sparked Bucks’s interest in “cosmic consciousness” and had a formative impact on Bucke’s thinking. Although Bucke’s treatment of cosmic consciousness was ultimately materialist and Carpenter’s idealist, the two used the concept to valorize unity over difference, simplicity over complexity: a logocentrism more profound than the materialism-idealism binary.