I. A gentle angel -- "In memorium Arcadie" -- "A gentle angel enter'd" -- 1855: Leaves of Grass -- II. 1857: Outrages -- Inventing the modern crime of obscentiy -- The war against "filth" -- The invention of civil divorce, and of sodomy as a crime against the modern state -- III. The state regulates desire -- Formative scandals -- Calamus: "Paths untrodden" -- Symonds's second scandal -- "Goblin market": attraction and aversion -- The state seizes the female body -- IV. Love and literature driven underground -- "I will go with him I love" -- Regina v. Hicklin: "To deprave and corrupt" -- Dangerous poems -- V. The laboratory of empire -- Six signs: "The anus and the state" -- Criminalizing "effeminacy": the arrests of Fanny and Stella -- "My dear sir" -- Comstock: censorship crosses the Atlantic -- VI. Counter-campaigns and resistance -- The arrests of Simeon Solomon -- Anie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh -- "The Greek spirit" -- "Were I as free": the secret sodomy poems -- VII. The next generation: Symonds, Whitman and Wilde -- "Love at first sight" -- Pilgrimage to Camden -- The Labouchere amendment: "gross indecency" -- Prophets of modernity -- "That life-long love of comrades" -- A problem in modern ethics -- VIII. The memoirs -- "As written by himself" -- "All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses" -- Epilogue -- Afterword: poetry as revolution.