Aesthetic and Decadent poetrysocial purpose. Swinburne's conscious renunciation of Arnold's moral
imperative in the name of art characterizes what would in the 1870s
become known as the Aesthetic Movement, and which twentieth-century
critics have labeled British aestheticism. By advancing the view that art has
no obligations to anything but itself, poets like Swinburne could find
themselves free to delve into unexplored topics, to plunge into their own
uninhibited thoughts and feelings, and to venture into worlds liberated
from moral censure. Aesthetic considerations could determine the course of
the work, and actually lead the morally passive writer into the active world
of the unconscious. As Swinburne gleefully pointed out in his poem
"Felise" (1866), artistic imagination could transcend the limitations of
banal reality and moral prescription by expanding its vision into a universe
that was not the conventionally familiar one:
For many loves are good to see;
Mutable loves, and loves perverse;
But there is nothing, nor shall be,
So sweet, so wicked, but my verse
Can dream of worse. (ACS I, 193)But while it seemed to emancipate poetry from the strict confines of
morality, delighting in sexual transgression, this declaration of freedom
also put the genre in a marginal position with regard to society, arguably
diminishing the poet's cultural authority. If "Poets" were no longer the
"unacknowledged legislators of the world" (as the radical Percy Bysshe
Shelley had proclaimed much earlier in the century), 6 and if poets were not
moral leaders as Arnold influentially declared, then poetry might be
independent and free, but it was now also isolated, having no other
relations and no significance except to aesthetics alone. Thus aestheticism's
well-known battle-cry of "art for art's sake" - which Swinburne absorbed
from French writers such as Theophile Gautier - had a dual effect, margin-
alizing art as it liberated it. Indeed, as aestheticism modulated into the
movement that Arthur Symons would in 1893 name "Decadence," 7 poets
discovered that search for sensuous release from a moralistic world could
prove estranging and frustrating, since they were increasingly disoriented
and alienated both morally and aesthetically.
This chapter explores how a wide range of poets associated with both
aestheticism and Decadents were enmeshed in a wide range of paradoxes as
they sought to free themselves from the religious and social functions that
had characterized art and elevated it above the world. Beginning with
Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry, this discussion pays special attention to the
emphasis that these poets often give to the developing importance of sexual
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