Aesthetic and Decadent poetry11 Bram Djikstra, Idols of Perversity Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle
Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
12 Camille Paglia, "Nature, Sex, and Decadence," in Pre-Raphaelite Poets, ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 226.
13 As Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, the sadistic antagonist of Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870), the prototypical dominatrix, is also
described as the creation of the masochist-narrator, a goddess invented to
provide intensity, purpose, and meaning to life: see "Coldness and Cruelty," in
Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1989).
14 Omar Khayyam, Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam: The Astronomer-Poet of Persia,
Translated into English Verse, trans. Edward FitzGerald (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1859), 3.
15 John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985),
10.
16 Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," in The Poetical
Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956),
84.
17 See Chris Snodgrass, "Aesthetic Memory's Cul-de-sac: The Art of Ernest
Dowson," English Literature in Transition, 1880-19Z0 35 (1992), 26-53, and
John R. Reed, "Bedlamite and Pierrot: Ernest Dowson's Esthetic of Futility,"
£LH 35 (1968), 94-113.
18 Arthur Symons, "Ernest Dowson," in The Poems of Ernest Dowson (London:
John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1905), x.
19 Cynthia Scheinberg, "Canonizing the Jew: Amy Levy's Challenge to Victorian
Poetic Identity," Victorian Studies 39 (1996), 175-99, and Joseph Bristow,
"'All out of Tune in this World's Instrument': The 'Minor' Poetry of Amy Levy,"
Journal of Victorian Culture 5 (1999), 118-45.
20 Chris White, "Michael Field: Tiresian Poet," in Victorian Women Poets: A
Critical Reader, ed. Angela Leighton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 148-61.
21 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 76.
22 Michael Field, Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses (London: George Bell,
1893), 68-69.
23 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry - The 1893 Text, ed.
Donald L. Hill (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 105. Pater's
study was first published as Studies in the History of Renaissance (London:
Macmillan, 1873).
24 Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," 858-59.
25 W.E. Henley, "Echoes, IV: To R.T.H.B.," in Henley, Poems (London: David
Nutt, 1898), 119.
26 Symons, "The Decadent Movement in Literature," 867. In a contemporaneous
essay on Henley, Symons observed: "Here is poetry made out of personal
sensations, poetry which is half physiological, poetry which is pathology - and
yet essential poetry" ("Mr. Henley's Poetry," Fortnightly Review 58 [1892],
186).
27 T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in Eliot, The Complete Poems
and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), 3.
28 See W.B. Yeats, "The Tragic Generation," in Yeats, Autobiographies, ed.
253