nPoetr y
Aestheticism
The old men wrote until they died: Browning in 1889, Tennyson in 1892, Morris in
1896, Swinburne in 1909. Of their juniors, on the basis of verse published before
1901, none is a major poet: William Ernest Henley (1849–1903), Lionel Johnson
(1867–1902), Ernest Dowson (1867–1900), W. B. Yeats (1867–1939), John Davidson
(1857–1909), A. E. Housman (1859–1936). Prose and verse taken together show
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) as a major talent. The major poetry of Hardy and
Yeats came after 1900. Looking back over the 19th century, it seems that, after the
death of Byron, Shelley, and especially Keats, poetry suffered a loss in quality and in
centrality.
In ‘The Tragic Generation’ (in Autobiographies) Yeats wrote of Johnson and
Dowson and other ‘companions of the Cheshire Cheese’, a pub off Fleet Street where
the Rhymers’ Club met. Some Rhymers are cameo’d in Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley: ‘Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels’; Johnson died ‘by falling
from a high stool in a pub’. Affecting dandyism, standing away from a prevailing
English heartiness – Gilbert’s Patience is again a guide – they became as precious as
they had pretended to be, emigrating inwards to dissipation and early death. Arthur
Symons (1865–1945) and John Gray (1866–1934) survived. Some were Decadents as
well as Aesthetes; many of them were dandies, many homosexual, most became
Catholics.Judged by continental standards, few were truly decadent. The mood and
subject-matter of the group is best caught in a line of Dowson’s, ‘They are not long,
the days of wine and roses’, and his ‘Cynara’, which ends:
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! and the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea,hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.These poets, like Swinburne and the painters Whistler and Sickert, often pursued
their French aesthetic ideals, sometimes in French cafés. In The Importance of Being
Earnest, the fictitious brother Ernest, killed off by Jack, is ‘said to have expressed a
desire to be buried in Paris’. ‘In Paris!’, exclaims Canon Chasuble. ‘I fear that hardly
points to any very serious state of mind at the last.’ Lionel Johnson is the only one of
this wasted group to write more than ten poems of interest, notably ‘The Dark
Angel’ and ‘On the Statue of Charles I at Charing Cross’. His art imposed economy
on the Swinburnian tendency to swoon. Both W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound were to
marry relatives of Lionel Johnson.
A. E. Housman
A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896), the most distinct volume of the decade,
later became very popular. Housman, the son of a Worcestershire solicitor, had feel-
ings for a fellow student at Oxford which were not reciprocated, as is suggested in an
unpublished poem: ‘Because I liked you better / Than it suits a man to say ...’. A
classical scholar, he failed his Finals and became a clerk in the Patent Office, yet in
1892 his learning earned him the Chair of Latin at University College, London. A
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