A handy but uneven collection of some pretty uneven writers

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	• Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose Beckson Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981 - 382 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A handy but uneven collection of some pretty uneven writers

Almost all of the authors collected here drank deeply of French influence, and wrote under the colossal shadow of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme. Those expecting something equal to those masters will be disappointed.

Some of them came close. E.g. Theodore Wratislaw:

I love you for the grief that lurks within
Your languid spirit, and because you wear
Corruption with a vague and childish air
And with your beauty know the depths of sin; . . .

not bad verse, until some spoilsport points out that all Wratislaw has done here is to make a sonnet out of Pater's observations on the Mona Lisa. And then again, some of these authors fall flat on their face, like Richard LeGallienne, who makes 'Beauty Accurst' say:

The sleepy kine move round me in desire
And press their oozy lips upon my hair,
Toads kiss my feet and creatures of the mire,
The snails will leave their shells to watch me there

lines that surely belong in the -Stuffed Owl Anthology-.

But of course, none of this is the fault of the learned editor who collected all of this neglected Yellow Book material, and who has expanded the helpful introduction and bibliography from the first edition. There is much worth reading here: Aubrey Beardsley's hilarious dedication of his erotic novella -Under the Hill- to a fictitious cardinal of the Roman church; the poems of Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons; and of course, the -Ballad of Reading Gaol- and -Salomé-.

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In his introduction to this now classic anthology, Karl Beckson traces the development of the Decadent or Aesthetic movement, illuminating the selected work of such as Wilde, Yeats, Symons, and Beerbohm that follows.