This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.

This chapter explores how the work of three of the ‘major’ modernist authors – T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats – might be considered to be invested in the ‘Decadent’ sensibility. The chapter begins by tracing the emergence of this Decadent sensibility in the late age of revolutionary romanticism, and in particular in Shelley’s claim that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’ If poets are, in 1821, legislators, it suggests they are no longer revolutionaries. Post-romantic poetry is then written in an age of failed, exhausted revolution and is often characterized by reactionary, backward-looking politics. In this narrative late modernism marks the culmination of this increasingly dispirited view of the world, so that Eliot, by the 1930s, invests in absolutist authority rather than in poetic possibility. As the chapter suggests, this view of the failure of poetic possibility was one which with the Decadent writers of the 1890s began to grapple. Try as they might, modernist authors found themselves caught in a Decadent paradox in which poetry could no longer transform the world, and so they turned to totalizing, even totalitarian politics.

When Ned Allen asked me to contribute a piece to this collection of critical chapters on Dylan Thomas, my reflex to say ‘yes’ was checked almost immediately by the recognition that I had no critical context for doing so. I write ‘almost immediately’ because my first response was a surge of affirming interest at the chance. And that is the double measure I want to unpack and formulate here – as a frame not just on the thoughts I am offering in this piece, but on the use and value of the collection for which it will serve as a coda.

My ‘yes’ came from a history and memory, from a personal depth of connection to this verse that I take to be representative of many others’. This is a poetry we read, and reread, and sang silently or whisperingly to ourselves in those years of middle or late adolescence when we were beginning to get some understanding feel for what poetry is, or can be, and can do. Involuntarily or inadvertently, I was memorising the poems of Dylan Thomas; gradually but inevitably, I had metabolised the poems of Dylan Thomas. The reasons why this could happen involve the strengths of a poetry that turn out to be limitations – not necessarily the limitations of the poems as poems, but of ourselves as readers, that is, of our propensity to put them into certain systems of critical translation, interpretive understanding. One of those systems, unwittingly undergone but then wittily (we would say) named, was ‘hormonal poetics’: here was a poetry opening up like the chemical experience of puberty – the intense but confusing sensorium of rhythm and image, a music of meaning as compelling but indeterminate as the urges of the unknown we were undergoing at the cellular level, impulses now turned outward into pulses in the physical body of language and displaced ultimately into the cultural bloodstream in the lyrics of the musician who traded Zimmerman for Dylan as his surname. In this spot of time – in physical as well as political history – the tremendously affective power of Dylan Thomas seems to be concentrated and intensified. And, most importantly, limited: so that, in the instant between the automatic ‘yes’ and the considered ‘but wait’ of my responses to the editor's invitation, I moved into that constricted vision of Thomas that had been prepared for me.