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Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents
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A facsimile reprint in the Decadents.... series, edited by R.K.R.Thornton ISBN 1 85477 156 6 174 x 110 mm 202 pages |
ARTHUR SYMONS Images of Good and Evil 1899 The decadence of Symons's interests in the early 1890s gave way by the end of the decade to Symbolism. This volume, the poetic partner to his influential critical work, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1900), is an important contribution to early modernism, and shows clearly what Yeats, among others, found valuable in his writing. Symons’s influence was considerable, his translations of Mallarmé, Verlaine and other French poets helping to map out a tradition for the poets who succeeded him. £30 $49.50 Meanwhile, something which is vaguely called Decadence had come into being. ... It pleased some young men in various countries to call themselves Decadents, with all the thrill of unsatisfied virtue masquerading as uncomprehended vice. As a matter of fact, the term is in its place only when applied to style; to that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé, for instance, which can be compared with what we are accustomed to call the Greek and Latin of the Decadence. No doubt perversity of form and perversity of matter are often found together, and, among the lesser men especially, experiment was carried far, not only in the direction of style. But a movement which in this sense might be called Decadent could but have been a straying from the main road of literature. Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire to ‘bewilder the middle-classes’ is itself middle-class. The interlude, half a mock-interlude, of Decadence, diverted the attention of the critics while something more serious was in preparation. That something more serious has crystallised, for the time, under the form of Symbolism... |
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