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Decadent Poetics
Literature and Form at the British Fin de SiĂšcle
J. Hall, A. Murray, J. Hall, A. Murray
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eBook - ePub
Decadent Poetics
Literature and Form at the British Fin de SiĂšcle
J. Hall, A. Murray, J. Hall, A. Murray
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Decadent Poetics explores the complex and vexed topic of decadent literature's formal characteristics and interrogates previously held assumptions around the nature of decadent form. Writers studied include Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as A.E. Housman, Arthur Machen and Hubert Crackanthorpe.
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How Decadent Poems Die
If English literary historians were to look anywhere for a period when poets resigned themselves to deathâs inevitability, they would probably turn to fin-de-siĂšcle decadence. This era remains more or less synonymous with the ostensibly dissipated careers of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde: three undeniably gifted writers whose premature demises at the turn of the century prompted their most distinguished contemporary, W. B. Yeats, to characterize them, many years later, as leading members of âThe Tragic Generationâ. All of them, including Yeats, had links with the legendary Rhymersâ Club, which produced two anthologies containing several poems that have always exemplified decadence. Yeats, who admitted he could not find a âfull explanation of that tragedyâ, speculated that âperhaps our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion that has no relation to any public interest, gathered together overwrought, unstable menâ.1 As several commentators have observed, his somewhat negative retrospective insinuates that these poetsâ early encounters with the graveâthrough alcoholism, consumption, and what might appear to be attendant forms of moral and sexual declineâwere already inscribed in their anti-social verses.2 On the face of it, some of their best-known works bear out Yeatsâs despondent viewpoint. No sooner, for example, has Dowsonâs drunken voice pondered the dregs that smear the glass of his quaffed beverage than he makes the following, finely cadenced observation: âhealth and hopeâ, he avers, âhave gone the way of love / Into the drear oblivion of thingsâ.3 Equally fatalistic, it seems, is Johnson, whose most famous poem involves a Job-like struggle with the vengeful âDark Angelâ of tormenting homoerotic desire. Through its echoes of Algernon Charles Swinburneâs contentious Poems and Ballads (1866), this relentless demon of âaching lustâ threatens to send his tortured soul to a hellish âSecond death, that never dies, / That cannot die, when time is deadâ.4 Similarly bleak is Wilde, whose finest poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), insists thatâin stanzas that mimic only to mock Rudyard Kiplingâs bullish prosodyââall men kill the thing they loveâ.5
It is perhaps too easy to build on Yeatsâs commentary and conclude that the tragedy of these men who lived âlives of such disorderâ was that they fulfilled their self-destructive desires by passing away before a robust modernity crushed them.6 During World War Two, John Betjeman did just that. He depicted the now elderly decadent as a pitiful spectacle. In âOn Seeing an Old Poet in the CafĂ© Royalâ (1940), Betjemanâs frail subject cannot withstand the âModernistic . . . lamplightâ that now glares across what had been a fĂȘted 1890s hangout. âVery old and very grandâ, this sad relic remains bewildered as he strives to relive the distant past.7 âWhere is Oscar? Where is Bosie?â he wonders. Betjemanâs poem evokes one of the finest observations in Richard Gilmanâs classic study, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (1979): âBefore any specific associations arise âdecadenceâ gives off a feeling of age, of superseded behavior, something almost quaint and even faintly comical.â8
During the 1890s, however, decadence thrived briefly as a potentially valuable concept. That the adjective âdecadentâ arose in the 1830s says much about its decidedly modern role in nineteenth-century attempts to describe particular aesthetic features associated with cultural decline. Its progenitor, according to the OED, was etymological innovator Thomas Carlyle, who crafted the term in The French Revolution (1837) to delineate those historical periods âin which no Ideal either grows or blossomsâ. By 1893, when Arthur Symons applied it to define â[t]he latest movement in modern literatureâ, it sustained a similar historicist inflection.9 Symons immediately acknowledged that decadent writing possesses âall the qualities we associate with the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities we find in the Greek, the Latinâ. Such characteristics, he claimed, included âan intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinementâ. Five years later, Havelock Ellis observed that decadent art defines itself against classicism. As âa further development of the classic styleâ, Ellis asserts, decadence makes âheterogeneousâ what had been âhomogenousâ.10 Where in the âclassic style . . . the parts are subordinated to the wholeâ, in the âdecadentâ one the opposite is true. â[A]ll artâ, he contends, âis the rising and falling of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremesâ, in which both poles have equal value.11 In a sense, Ellisâs definition evokes the idea that decadence takes critically apart the perfected forms that classicism has pieced together. Set side by side, Symonsâs and Ellisâs reflections on decadenceâa term whose presumed immorality ensured that it could not survive the 1890s unscathed12âdraw attention to why some of the most remarkable poets of this era remained preoccupied with ideas about inexorable decay for reasons that have little to do with whatever self-destructive whims appear in their poetry.
Modern critics have done much to uncover the intellectual background to these serious 1890s examinations of decadence. In an influential study, Linda Dowling asserts that decadence is a movement whose fascination with studied artifice and antique forms corresponds with these writersâ troubled perception of âthe post-philological problem of languageâ.13 As Dowling sees it, the reception of Romantic philology in England, whose chief intermediaries included Max MĂŒller at Oxford, stirred up in later Victorian generations a heightened awareness that the âincidentally bleak implications of the new linguistic scienceâ included the idea that the destiny of English was inescapably that of Greek and Latin: the dead languages on which much of their well-developed literary knowledge was based.14 Dowling reveals that Dowson and Johnson count among preeminent decadents who âbestow[ed] a belated and paradoxical vitality on literary language that linguistic science had declared to be deadâ.15 To be sure, Dowling discloses that the strategies these male decadent poets undertook hardly conform to the emasculated lassitude that enlivened the wit of satirists such as Max Beerbohm, who delighted in exaggerating the fin-de-siĂšcle male poetsâ funnier cultural excesses. (The laughable title of the volume that Beerbohmâs imaginary decadent poet, Enoch Soames, publishes is Negations.16) Yet it would be mistaken to assume that their poetry mainly strove to pump the last belated breaths into the evident corpse that was the English language.
The work of Dowson, Johnson, and Wilde contributes to a much broader development in fin-de-siĂšcle greater poetry in which mortality fixes poetsâ attention on their place within a far-reaching tradition of Greek, Latin, and English literature. Their thoughtful dialogues with the wisdom of Sappho, Propertius, Horace, and Ovid, as well as recent figures such as Swinburne, frequently articulate dissident desires that proved hard to express elsewhere. Once we acknowledge this marked tendency in the greatest poets of this period, it becomes possible to understand that decadence is not the sole preserve of the most prominent members of the Rhymersâ Club. The passionate insubordination that we discover in writers as diverse as A. E. Housman, Dowson, and Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) points to a broadening definition of decadent poeticsâone that shows the ways in which some of the finest 1890s lyrics look back to the authority of the poetic past to embrace, sometimes shockingly, the desirability of death. In what follows, I begin with representative examples from the works of each poet. Thereafter, I look in much greater depth at several of their most thoughtful engagements with Classical sources that support what I will call their decadent perspectives on mortality. Decadence, however, is not a term that any of these writers readily espoused, least of all Housman, who is perhaps the fin-de-siĂšcle poet most preoccupied with death. Yet Housmanâs poetry, as well his contacts and interests, place him squarely within the 1890s generation that acknowledged the legacy of aestheticism, especially in relation to Swinburneâs sexual and religious unorthodoxy.17
I
In Housmanâs quietly rebellious volume A Shropshire Lad (1896), whose hardly outspoken homosexual and atheist sentiments have become critically more audible in recent years, we detect extraordinary density of both Classical and modern allusion. By 1898, when the second edition appeared, this magnificent collection won plaudits for its âsimplicity without affectionâ, even if its âever-recurring thought of mortalityâ suggested to one reader that Housmanâs âwas a positively funereal museâ.18 This reviewer objected in particular to lyric âXLIIâ, subtitled âThe Merry Guideâ. Even if this adroit poem proved stylistically âcharmingâ, it seemed much too fixated on âthe society and conversation of Charonâ.19 In deceptively tripping three-beat lines, Housmanâs voice recalls walking through a âthymy woldâ where he met the alluring psychopomp Hermes.20 âWith feathered cap on foreheadâ, Hermes proved irresistible; memorably, with âfriendly brows and laughter / He lookedâ the speaker âin the eyesâ (Poems, p. 42). âOh, whence, I asked, and whither?â the poetic voice reminisces, in immediate excited response to the fleet-footed godâs captivating gaze (Poems, p. 42). The question, as Burnett shows, echoes an inquiry (âunde quo veni?â) from Horaceâs twenty-seventh poem in the third book of Odes (Poems, p. 350). Yet it is not only Horace who echoes through this spirited recollection of having been led towards oneâs death. In his imposing edition of Housmanâs poetry, Archie Burnett locates several correspondences with the works of nineteenth-century poets, especially Matthew Arnold (âResignationâ [1849]), as well as Tennyson (âLocksley Hallâ [1842]), William Allingham (âAutumnal Sonnetâ [1854]), and Algernon Charles Swinburne (âThalassiusâ [1880]), among others (Poems, pp. 350â1). As these allusions accumulate, the speaker remembers feeling âContent at heartâ as he âfollowedâ his âdelightful guideâ (Poems, p. 43). But, noticeably, the god whose âlips . . . brim with laughterâ ominously leads forth with a âserpent-circled wandâ (Poems, p. 44). What is more, Hermesâ lips ânever once respondâ (Poems, p. 44). To follow such a handsome god, no matter how much âContentâ such experience evokes in the speaker, results of course in death, without, it seems, any intimacy with this singularly attractive male guide. Wryly, this lyric, like many in A Shropshire Lad, points to the fated nature of unreciprocated desire, which is here, with more than a few gentle hints, homoerotic in kind.
By comparison, in Michael Fieldâs Long Ago (1889)âthe impressive volume of sixty-nine poems that take Sapphoâs fragments for their inspirationâthe culminating lyric gives voice to the Lesbian poet just before she leaps from the Leucadian rock. Sapphoâs legendary act of self-murder comes after the fisherman Phaon betrays her, an episode that Ovid famously records in the Heroides. In Ovidâs dramatization of this scene, Sapphoâs impassioned first-person speech declares that the love she once expressed for the women of Lesbos now seems shameful in light of her unfulfilled desire for Phaon, who has abandoned her. In a moment of empowered self-address, Ovidâs Sappho insists: âTake up a lyre and a quiver of arrows, / You will seem to us like Apollo: / or let horns burst from your brow and be Bacchusâ.21 The moment Ovidâs Sappho has figured herself in the form of these artistically and sexually inspiring gods, she recalls that her rival âAlcaeus himself has no richer fameâ.22 And yet, as Ovidâs epistle unfolds, Sappho, in her unfailing resolve to write immortal poetry, expresses her fear âthat grief kills [her] art and woe stops [her] geniusâ, even if such ardent sentiments avow the opposite is true.23
In Michael Fieldâs concise lyric on Sapphoâs suicide, however, there is little attempt to emulate the impassioned drama that animates ...