The Poets of the Nineties

The 1890s are alive and well, as attested by current critical-historical scholarship. Contrary to long standing notions, moreover, the arts in the era represent dynamics and beginnings instead of the dead ends typically associated with “decadence” and other aspects of those times. Women poets increasingly emerge as competitive with the figures, e.g., Wilde, Whistler, Beardsley, Dowson, and Symons, who have long enjoyed limelight. The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford, 2013) includes many comments on 1890s material.

Lee Christine O’Brien’s The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry (University of Delaware Press, 2013) includes extensive coverage of Rosamund Marriott Watson (“Graham Tomson”), increasingly a rising star for those interested in 1890s poets. Praising Marriott Watson’s achievements in the romance lyric (what, in terms of Tomson-Watson’s experiements, I would call neo-balladry), O’Brien convincingly illustrates Marriott Watson’s artistry in creating ballads in which the feminine sensibility is uppermost, enriched by more sophisticated lyricism than old ballads contain. O’Brien acknowledges debts to Linda K. Hughes’s work on Marriott Watson. The critiques of “The Ballad of a Were-wolf” and “The White Lady” are especially illuminating in context. Each draws on folklore for its theme, but the former “domesticates” monstrousness, as it were, and the latter subtly employs a child’s point of view to bring the ancient lore of tragedy when a human falls in love with a statue into contemporary 1890s context. Marriott Watson’s familiarity with older ballad themes and techniques is evident in her anthologies (ed. under her pseudonym, “Graham R. Tomson”) Ballads of the North Countrie (1888) and Border Ballads (1888). That she updated balladry places her in company with many other nineteenth-century poets, from Walter Scott to D. G. Rossetti to contemporaries such as Davidson. More on Davidson as poet and critic (of Symons’s London Nights, and of the virtues of blank verse over rhyme) and of the poetry of the streets, as found in Henley and Rhys, appears in Peer Robinson’s “The Poetry of Modern Life: On the Pavement” (The Oxford Handbook, 265–60). Still more on Davidson appears in Adam Peitte’s “Modernist Victorianism” (The Oxford Handbook, 273–90). Here, Davidson’s affinities with Nietzsche are charted, as are similarities between his poetic message and that of Futurist Mina Loy in their verse depictions of urban life. Read in conjunction Stefania Forlini, “Modern Narratives and Decadent Things in Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors” (ELT 55, no. 4 [2012], 479–98), for another text wherein persons and things become interchangeable.

Kindred viewpoints inform Margaret D. Stetz’s “‘Ballads in Prose’: Genre Crossing in Late Victorian Women’s Writing” (Victorian Literature and Culture 34 [2006], 619–29), which I mention only to move to a related piece, William Greenslade’s “Naturalism and Decadence: The Case of Hubert Crackanthorpe” (Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form in the British Fin de Siècle, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 163–80). Crackanthorpe is implicitly presented as a creator of poetic prose, which places him with many other 1890s artists who cross generic borders, and in context one should also consult Catherine Maxwell in the same volume, “Scents and Sensibility: The Fragrance of Decadence,” 201–25). Here, too, Dennis Denisoff (“‘A Disembodied Voice’: The Postuman Formlessness of Decadence,” 181–200) declares: “For all their apparent flash and flaunting, British decadents have proven notoriously difficult to pin down” (181). Yes indeed they have, thus their continuing to intrigue readers, and although Denisoff focuses on prose writers, especially Wilde, du Maurier, and Corelli, his argument as well applies to many poets and other artists in the era, e.g., D’Arcy, Makower, Whistler, and Beardsley.

We move naturally to Wilde. Ellis Hanson’s “Salome, Simile, Symboliste” (The Oxford Handbook: 141–62) highlights Wilde’s combinations of writerly, pictorial, and olfactory effects in his dramatic rendering of the Salome-John the Baptist story. Wilde’s emphasis on Iokanaan’s voice turns him into a symbol more so than he functions as a performative character. Salome finds his voice sexually stimulating, but her pictorial references...