Chapter 2 focuses on the early poetry and drama, in which Yeats discovers the worldmaking potential of art and creates at least two kinds of autonomous imaginary worlds: an impossible one based on the otherworld of faery, a parallel world of nonhuman beings and magical practices, and a possible one based on the private world of the lover and beloved, a world created in the artistic recasting of memory and desire. In the poetry, temporality is recursive and generative, with aspects of the past and future arranged in a nested fashion so that temporal moments are embedded in one another and, in a sense, produce one another. The early drama tends to express this tensed temporality in terms of the confrontation between two worlds: the actual world and the faery otherworld. These tensed temporalities enable both an accommodation of what is outside the realm of human experience and a renewed sense of the nature and limits of that experience. Misprision – the strange deceptions of the faery otherworld on the one hand and the recollected fantasies that structure so many of the early poems on the other – characterizes these new temporal arrangements.

This chapter argues that the nocturne poem, a quintessential genre of the 1890s, attunes itself to the decade’s changing relationship between the human and the natural, the aesthetic and the artificial, with some poets representing an urban, bright, smoky night sky and others presenting visions that blur city lights and starlight, or surreal representations of forests. This chapter approaches the nocturne as a transnational genre, treating British poets Mathilde Blind and Arthur Symons, alongside E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), an Indigenous Canadian poet, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who launched his career writing poetry in English in San Francisco in the 1890s. Noguchi and Johnson both play into European stereotypes that writers of color offer a premodern mystique; yet both also resist that stereotype by fully engaging with the artistic and poetic trends of the 1890s in their nocturnes and by offering alternative visions of modernity. The nocturne illuminates how transnational poets understood the night sky in the wake of industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels.

Chapter 2 examines the significance of the association between music and masochism in texts by Walter Pater, Vernon Lee and Arthur Symons. Here music is variously figured as acting upon the body in a manner that resists the imposition of identity and refuses the coherence of the self, while turning instead to modes of self-abandonment and disembodiment. Music in Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ dramatizes a broader oscillation in his works between the denial and embrace of wilfully self-destructive masochistic violence. In ‘Marsyas in Flanders’ (1900), Vernon Lee strategically embraces the figure of Marsyas – an emblem of musical masochism – as a means of resisting the categorization of the queer body by fin-de-siècle sexology. In Symons’s ‘Christian Trevalga’ (1902) music becomes associated with a desire to abandon the materiality of the body and affirm instead a form of subjectivity defined by ‘disembodiment’. Symons’s essays on music and musical performance present the aesthetic autonomy of absolute music in a manner that articulates a form of dispersed subjectivity that can profitably be read in the light of contemporary queer theory.

The introduction to this volume sets out some of the challenges in defining and using the term ‘decadence’ to describe the literature covered by the chapters that follow. It begins by establishing the patterns for conservative dismissals of Decadent literature in responses to the Pre-Raphaelite poets in the 1870s, before turning to the hysteric anti-Decadent critique of Max Nordau. In opposition to these challenges to ‘decadence’ it surveys some of the most important attempts to define a literature of Decadence: Gautier, Bourget, and Arthur Symons. What emerges is an understanding of Decadence as another name not for cultural decline and dissipation, but for aesthetic and cultural revolution. The chapter then examines how Decadent studies has in recent years undergone a series of transformations, encouraging us to interrogate the gendered, temporal, formal, political and geographical frameworks that had governed earlier understandings of Decadence as a literary practice in Britain.

As the long shadow of Tennyson began to retreat in the 1880s, poetry found itself without clear directions for form or content. The temporality of the decade is a kind of anti-teleological anticipation--poets felt that something new needed to happen, but what that advent was remained unspecified. These conditions left a space for ‘minor poetry’, a term that implies not a position on a scale of value but a field of innovation and experimentation. This chapter first surveys the way this shifting ground is captured in anthologies, and discusses how the poetry of the decade resists easy capture in literary history. It then goes on to explore how the temporality of the 1880s is reflected in W. E. Henley’s ‘In Hospital’ sequence of lyric poems.