The threat of isolation outlined in the previous chapter might seem particularly relevant to Decadent lyric poetry. Paul Bourget's theorisation of Decadence as a relation between part and whole finds in it the isolation of the individual, disconnected from the greater social body: a Decadent society is one in which there are ‘un trop grand nombre d'individus impropres aux travaux de la vie commune’ [‘too many individuals unsuited to the labours of communal life’]. Bourget goes on to define a Decadent literary style as one in which there is a corresponding breakdown in subordination of part to whole:

Nowhere might this seem more true than in Arthur Symons's definition of Decadent poetry as characterised by the ‘disembodied voice’. Yet in this chapter I suggest that within this process of decomposition and deracination, a new type of connection with the whole is being discovered. In what follows I develop a reading of Decadent lyric phenomenology along several different dimensions, taking the work of Arthur Symons as the central focus. Exploring the relevance of phenomenological ideas to the operations of first Impressionism and then Symbolism in Symons's poetic practice, the chapter complicates claims (notably Symons's own) for Decadent lyric's disembodiment. Moving on, in the third section, to outline the relevance of phenomenological ideas of the ‘reduction’, I suggest that we might witness in aestheticist lyric compression something similar to that stripping away of the social concepts by which we think we know the world in order to reveal a more fundamental connection. The chapter concludes with an extended reading of one of Symons's best-known poems, bringing together the phenomenological frames of reference built up in the previous three sections.

Impressionist poetry might be the best-recognised marker of the shift of lyric's affiliation from ear to eye in the later nineteenth century.