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It is tempting to linger over the early lyrics of W. B. Yeats and find in their yearning for ideal beauty the consummate expression of fin de siècle aestheticism and decadence. The poems of the 1890s, especially those which appeared in The Rose (1893) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), are everywhere infused with what Yeats himself recognized as ‘those faint lights and faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call “the decadence”’. Yeats, having a more progressive and dynamic view of cultural history than many of his contemporaries, preferred to think of the fin de siècle as ‘the autumn of the body’ because the arts were but sleeping and ‘dreaming of things to come’. This idea of decadence giving birth to new life is in keeping with the legendary account Yeats gives of his fellow ‘Rhymers’ – Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons and others – and his careful staging of ‘The Tragic Generation’ is designed, in part, to present his own work as a distinctive and emergent ‘new poetic’. In the modernist twenties, however, Yeats was still composing decadent lyrics like ‘Oil and Blood’, and happily proclaiming ‘We have returned of late to the mood of the nineties.’ Notwithstanding this surge of fin-de-siècle fervour, it is commonly accepted that the 1890s were essentially a time of transition for Yeats, a dabbling with the palette in preparation for the big canvases to come. One familiar explanation of Yeats's poetic development has to do with Ireland.
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