Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

VINCENT O'SULLIVAN

The Houses of Sin 1897
bound with
Poems 1896

American-born Vincent O'Sullivan - ‘un charmant garçon’ to Dowson, ‘really very pleasant, for one who treats life from the standpoint of the tomb’ according to Wilde - wrote stories, poems, essays, novels, and the much-reprinted Aspects of Wilde (1936). The early poems have Pre-Raphaelite characteristics, like some of Yeats in his youth; the mature work is death-obsessed, haunted by the ghost of Baudelaire. ‘In what a midnight his soul seems to walk!’ wrote Wilde. 'And what maladies he draws from the moon!' Of independent means in his youth, he helped Wilde financially after his disgrace, but himself died in poverty, in Paris in 1940.

£32.50 $49.50

Over the fields, by hedge and tree,
A white thing comes from the frigid zone;
Chill are the hands of this gaunt lady,
Cold, grave-cold is her freezing moan.
See! to the corpse she doth softly creep -
The wife of Death, and mother of Sleep:
The two dead women are all alone.

(‘A Cold Night’, Poems page 9)

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Poetry of the 1890s