This chapter examines the reception of Decadence in Britain by focusing on responses to the poet Paul Verlaine. For many Anglophone readers Verlaine epitomized Decadence, but comment upon his work is hedged by euphemism and ambiguity. I argue that this reflects the ‘queer’ resonance of Decadence for British readers, encompassing Verlaine’s status as a homosexual poet and, more generally, the power of Decadent writing to question and unsettle received knowledge (including sexual norms). The chapter traces the origins of the term ‘Decadence’ through classical historiography to the work of Charles Baudelaire and its transition across the Channel in the 1890s, as writers including Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, John Gray and Michael Field absorbed the influence of Baudelaire’s literary successors, J. K. Huysmans and Verlaine, into their own work. Symons’ description of Decadence as a ‘new and beautiful and interesting disease’ helpfully draws together what British readers found so appealing and so disturbing about Decadence – its continental origins, its association with various kinds of transgression and its capacity to revitalize clichéd ways of thinking.

Decadents believed their civilization had reached its peak and was on the brink of collapse. The only solution was the destruction of civilization by ‘barbarians’ who would bring ‘fresh blood’ to humanity. Eventually their civilization would also grow old and weaken, and a new cycle would begin. The archetypal model for this trope was the collapse of the Roman Empire. Paul Verlaine’s famous poem ‘Languor’ exemplifies this Decadent motif, on which Joris-Karl Huysmans also elaborates. The first part of this chapter illustrates how Verlaine’s poem directly influenced Valery Bryusov’s ‘The Coming Huns’, a touchstone of Russian Decadence. One of the many variants of the ‘Roman Paradigm’ was the destruction of Sodom, a motif examined in the second half of the chapter, focusing on the poetry of Jiří Karásek. Karásek wrote the first homoerotic verse in Czech literature under the influence of Oscar Wilde, whom he bravely defended as de facto editor of the Decadent journal The Modern Revue. Thus this chapter focuses on two variants of the trope of civilization’s collapse, one influenced by French Decadence and the other by British Decadence.