Decadence, that flowering of a mannered literary style in France during the Second Empire, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Britain, hol

This book examines for the first time together poems by three protagonists of the 1890s: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Ernest Dowson.

`Verlaine, possessed by the madnesses of love, brimming over with desires and prayers, the rebel railing against the complacent platitudes of society, of love,

'Poetry will no longer keep in time with action; it will be ahead of it.' Arthur Rimbaud The active and colourful lives of the poets of nineteenth-century Franc