The idea that Auden should write a travel book occurred to him in the spring of 1936 after he had had lunch at Bryanston with Michael Yates, a former pupil from his days as a master at the Downs School. Yates reported that he was due to visit Iceland that summer as part of a small school trip, and, as he later recalled, Auden quickly became excited by the thought of the journey.1 His imagination had been stirred by thoughts of the North ever since his father had read the small boy Norse myths as bedtime stories. After some slightly tangled negotiations, Auden persuaded his publisher Faber to cover the costs of a trip, and he arranged with the teacher leading the excursion that they should meet while there: their experiences could form an element in the book that he had agreed to co-write with his friend Louis MacNeice. Auden took the boat from Hull sometime in mid-June, but as it happened MacNeice’s arrival was delayed until 9 August and the Bryanston party wasn’t scheduled to turn up till the 17, so Auden spent much of the time on his own, including the voyage out which took five or so tiresome days. He was not much taken with Reykjavik once disembarked: ‘Lutheran, drab and remote’ was his first impression.2 He spent a lonely week, with ‘nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence; at ruinous expense’, not greatly diverted by the task of correcting the proofs of his next volume of poems which Faber had sent through. But then he set out to explore the island with a guide, taking an anthropological interest in local phenomena such as cheese making and herring gutting, and his spirits rose (Prose, I. 256, 258).

Jane Hedley accounts for Plath’s descriptive and interpretive practice of poems that take art as their subject. Plath’s ekphrastic poems can be seen as interventions in a conversation with canonical predecessors from Keats to Auden, and can be traced not just to her deliberate study of art history, but to the studies she made as a visual artist, before she made the decision in young adulthood to concentrate on writing.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.

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.