Chapter 21 - Modern Prophetic Poetry and the Decadence of Empires: From Kipling to Auden

Summary

This chapter focuses on decadence not as a supposed literary revolution culminating in modernism but as a continuity in the adoption of poetic subject-matter of a particular kind, namely, the fates of empires and civilisations, especially their fragility, decline, and disintegration. In works of such non-modernist poets as Rudyard Kipling and W. H. Auden the decadent tradition persists under new twentieth-century conditions, not by echoing Baudelairean moods or manners but by rediscovering and reworking the underlying historical myth of the Decadence—the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, considered explicitly or implicitly as the model for the fates of all later empires. In the half-century considered here, 1897–1947, world events pressed collapsing empires to the attention of writers on an unprecedented scale. At such an epoch Kipling, Auden, and others came forward with boldly ‘prophetic’ visions of a world order that they suggest, by reading the symptoms and auguries of the times, is undergoing general collapse.