Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents

A facsimile reprint in the Decadents.... series, edited by R.K.R.Thornton
and Ian Small

ISBN 1 85477 155 8

174 x 110 mm 244 pages

ARTHUR SYMONS

Silhouettes 1896

bound with
London Nights 1897

Arthur Symons (1865-1945), the central Decadent writer of the 1890s, was a poet of urban life, who found stimulation and metaphor in the music-hall and the city street. He dealt with aspects of London other writers usually avoided - prostitution and casual sex in particular - pursuing fleeting impressions without making moral connexions, as Pater had recommended. For these facsimiles we have used the revised editions of 1896 and 1897, containing critical prefaces in which Symons justifies his poetic practice.

£35 $55

The little bedroom papered red,
The gas’s faint malodorous light,
And one beside me in the bed,
Who chatters, chatters, half the night.

I drowse and listen, drowse again,
And still, although I would not hear,
Her stream of chatter, like the rain,
Is falling, falling on my ear.

(From ‘Leves Amores’, London Nights, page 46)



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