Aesthetic and Decadent poetryview of Decadence in the 1890s. The darkness of nature coupled with the
lack of divine responsibility; the progressively menacing external world; the
existential situation in which the individual rather than some divine power
has control over his response: all of these elements point to the despondent
vision that enervated many of Henley's Decadent contemporaries such as
Dowson and Levy.
Symons's evaluation of Henley's poetry assesses a range of qualities
evident in the poetic diary titled "In Hospital" (written between 1872 and
1875). Like "Invictus," "In Hospital" was composed around the time when
the famous doctor Joseph Lister succeeded in saving Henley, who had
already had a leg surgically removed, from a further amputation. This
moving series of poems records both the professional activities of the
hospital and the poet's unflinching reactions to them. Symons's remarks on
Henley's work are worth reading because they reveal how broad the
definition of Decadence could be:
The ache and throb of the body in its long nights on a tumbled bed, and as it
lies on the operating-table awaiting "the thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,"
are brought home to us as nothing else I know in poetry has ever brought the
physical sensations... [I]n certain fragments, he has come nearer than any
other English singer to what I have called the achievement of Verlaine and the
ideal of the Decadence: to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a
human soul. 26The vivid image of the aching and throbbing body awaiting surgery in some
respects anticipates how in 1917 T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock imaged the
sky "like a patient etherised upon a table." 27 Consequently, the marked
sense of mental and physical alienation that characterizes "In Hospital" may
well appear proto-Modernist, signaling a new development in literature.
But Henley's readers in the 1890s were more likely to view such Decadence
as the deterioration of humanity, where all that is left are numbing "physical
sensations" and a "disembodied voice" to articulate them.
Given his reputation, Oscar Wilde would at first seem a far more familiar
Decadent than Henley ever was. And, indeed, their approaches to life and
literature could not be more different. Even though WB. Yeats would class
Wilde among the many 1890s poets who belonged to a "tragic genera-
tion," 28 it was the case that Wilde sometimes saw in the relativity of truth
the possibility of creativity, rather than doom and destruction. If nothing is
definitively true, he felt, then everything is possible: a point that his essays
such as "The Decay of Lying" (1889) and "The Critic As Artist" (1890)
take to its logical and liberating conclusion. In fact, one might argue that in
this respect Wilde's innovative criticism consciously started to revise some
of the precepts of Decadence in the name of the movement that would