DECADENT

French Dcadent, any of several poets of the end of the 19th century, including the French Symbolist poets in particular and their contemporaries in England, the later generation of the Aesthetic movement. Both groups aspired to set literature and art free from the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and, in both, the freedom of some members' morals helped to enlarge the connotation of the term, which is almost equivalent to fin de sicle. In France it was Paul Verlaine who gladly accepted the descriptive epithet dcadent, which had been used in a collection of parodies, Les Dliquescences d'Ador Floupette (1885; The Corruption of Ador Floupette), by Gabriel Vicaire and Henri Beauclair. From 1886 to 1889 appeared a review, Le Dcadent, founded by Anatole Baju, with Verlaine among its contributors. The Decadents claimed Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) as their inspiration and counted Arthur Rimbaud, Stphane Mallarm, and Tristan Corbire among themselves. Another significant figure was the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, who developed interest in the esoteric and whose rebours (1884; Against the Grain) was called by Arthur Symons the breviary of the Decadence. In England the Decadents were the poets of the 1890sArthur Symons (the blond angel), Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson, who were members of the Rhymers' Club or contributors to The Yellow Book.