Selected Early Poems

<p>Arthur Symons (1865-1945) was a central figure in the decadent phase of English poetry of the 1890s.  His early verse notably in the major collections <em>Silhouettes</em> (1892; revd 1896) and <em>London Nights </em>(1895; revd 1897) created a sophisticated new kind of urban poetry out of the gas-lit world of London theatre and night-life. Under the French influences of Baudelaire and Verlaine Symons developed a wistful poetic eroticism new to English readers leading the way to the modernism of T. S. Eliot and others in the next generation.</p><p>This selection from Symons’s most fertile period as a poet reproduces the fuller revised editions of <em>Silhouettes</em> and <em>London Nights</em> in their entirety together with related poems from his other early volumes <em>Days and Nights</em> (1889) <em>Amoris Victima</em> (1897) <em>Images of Good and Evil</em> (1899) and with early poems collected in <em>Knave of Hearts</em> (1913).</p><p>Fully annotated and supplemented by related critical writings by Symons Walter Pater and others this text offers students of late-Victorian literature a rich resource for the understanding of decadence in the London literary scene of the 1890s.</p>