lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THE NINETIES"Such lines from St Mark's Eve, and one might continuethe quotation and cite others (e.g. Bartlemas)from the same volume—Holiday and other Poems(1906)—and the seasonal songs in the first Ballads and Songs(1894), all these have the spontaneity and joyous flowof George Wither's lyrical rhapsodies, with a richer,more sensuous art. A Runnable Stag is a delightfulrevel of colour and rhyme. The music and pure joyof lyrical poetry is at a discount just now, but Davidson'sbest poems will not be ultimately lost to sight.One is more doubtful of the fate of his would-bemetaphysical poems.It was not in the realistic, journalistic direction ofpoems like In Hospital, London Voluntaries, LondonTypes, Fleet Street Eclogues, Barrack Room Ballads thatthe poets to whom I referred at the beginning of thislecture, the poets who gave us the legend of the" nineties," turned for their inspiration—Oscar Wilde,Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson,W. B. Yeats, Francis Thompson, and some minors,whose poetry links itself in the memory, rather fancifullyperhaps, with the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Theirpoetry is not popular in motif or treatment. Liketheir predecessors and inspirers, the Pre-Raphaelites,they are cultivators of the exotic in life and art. Theyhave been, or some of them, loosely called " decadents,"and if one accepts the late Remy de Gourmont'sdefinition of decadence, one may so call them inasmuchas the exotic and surprising element in their poetry isfound in some disassociation of ideas and sentimentswhich for the majority of the British public were inseparablyunited, established truths of thought orfeeling. For even the Catholicism in which some ofthem found an imaginative or intellectual delight or, it141