J. William Lloyd — Collected Poems

June 4, 1857, Westfield, New Jersey–October 23, 1940, Grahamville, Florida

Poet, anarchist, pantheist, sexual reformer, homesteader, drugless physician, and tireless self-publisher, J. William Lloyd turned a life of radical experiment into verse. His poetry ranges from free-love lyrics and hospital elegies to Arizona desert sequences and a shipboard European diary, making landscape and bodily experience the testing ground for freedom. This edition gathers his four complete poetry books and the major sestina from his social manifesto, restores their stanzas and indents from original scans, and separates Lloyd’s interleaved maxims from the verse.

READ / DOWNLOAD PDF

Catalogue

Reform, Labor & Radical Print

Associations

Anarchists and Individualists Borderlands and Spanish-Language California California Utopias Comparative Religion Desert Writing Eccentrics and Outsiders Left, Labor, and Socialism Mysticism and Occultism Nature, Science, and Environment Self-Published California

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Lloyd, J. William. Wind-Harp Songs. The Peter Paul Book Company, 1895.

———. The Red Heart in a White World: A Suggestive Manual of Free Society, Containing a Method and a Hope. 1897; Westfield, New Jersey, 1898.

———. Songs of the Unblind Cupid. J. Wm. Lloyd, 1899.

———. Dawn-Thought on the Reconciliation: A Volume of Pantheistic Impressions and Glimpses of Larger Religion. 1900; 2nd ed., The Lloyd Group, 1904.

———. The Natural Man: A Romance of the Golden Age. Benedict Prieth, 1902.

———. Songs of the Desert. Lloyd Publishing Group, 1905.

———. Life’s Beautiful Battle; or, The Human Soul Before Pain. The Lloyd Group, 1910.

———. Songs Overseas. Lloyd Publishing Group, 1914.

———. The Book of the Beahrees: The Manifesto of the Religion of Beauty. Roscoe, California, 1923.

———. The Scripture of Courage and Largeness. J. William Lloyd, 1927.

———. Eneres; or, The Questions of Reksa. George Allen & Unwin, 1929.

———. Questions of Reksa. Houghton Mifflin, 1930.

———. The Karezza Method; or, Magnetation: The Art of Connubial Love. Roscoe, California, 1931.

———. From Hill-Terrace Outlooking: Poems of Perception, Intuition and Prophecy. S. Stebb, 1939. 48 pp. Cover title reverses “perception” and “intuition”; HathiTrust copies are search-only.

———. Maxims and Meditations. Vol. 1. Roscoe, California, 1940.

———. “A Brief Sketch of the Life of J. William Lloyd.” 8 Feb. 1940.

Lloyd, J. William, Jo Labadie, and Laurance Labadie. The Dwellers in Vale Sunrise, How They Got Together and Lived Happy Ever After. The Ariel Press, 1904.

Lloyd, J. William, Edward Hubert Wood, and Comalk-Hawk-Kih. Aw-Aw-Tam Indian Nights: Being the Myths and Legends of the Pimas of Arizona. The Lloyd Group, 1911.

Works About the Author

Beck, Robert. “Biography of John William Lloyd.” Unpublished manuscript based on conversations with Lloyd, in the John William Lloyd Papers, University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center.

Bucke, Richard Maurice. Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. Innes & Sons, 1901. Includes Lloyd as a case study.

Lloyd, J. William. “A Brief Sketch of the Life of J. William Lloyd.” The Anarchist Library. Primary autobiographical source.

“Lloyd, J Wm.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, updated 1 Dec. 2024.

The Online Books Page. “Lloyd, J. Wm. (John William), 1857–1940.” University of Pennsylvania.

“John William Lloyd Papers, 1926–1934.” University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center. Finding aid.