The poets who we have come to know as Modernists often look back nostalgically to the 1890s’ sense of artistic exhaustion. They reflect on the strenuous interactions between subjectivity and artifice, especially in their early careers. In A Lume Spento (1908), Ezra Pound notes that ‘The hour flows / And joins its hue to mighty hues out-worn / Weaving the perfect Picture, while we torn / Give cry in harmony’ (1976: 29). Poetic self-reflection and self-splitting inhere in the anxiety of the artistic process. Pound nods to the dichotomies of Wilde's ‘Helas!’, and to Swinburne. The ‘out-worn’ hues carry a double meaning: while conjuring a fin-de-siècle patina that needs to be broken, they bring about an entrapment in Decadent decay. The ‘perfect Picture’ vacillates between ultimate artifice and tormented self-questioning. This is the note that dominates Georgian and early Modernist poetry. The endeavour of Pound, Yeats and Eliot to transcend the artifice of the post-Romantic imagination from Swinburne, through Pater, to the Decadent Nineties is both dealt with and threatened by a new level of Aestheticism, which is the result of the poets’ self-conscious efforts to supersede it or shake it off.

The aim of this Coda is to open up suggestions about the chief ways in which encounters between subjectivity and artifice, sensuousness and art persist, albeit in transmuted form, beyond the fin de siècle. The Edwardians and Georgians retained a nostalgia for, and fascination with, the yellow decade. The instrumental role of Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature in communicating the French avant-garde to the Modernists needs no further elucidation. A longing for, and an alliance with, the Nineties is identifiable in various key Modernist anthologies, such as Yeats’ The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), in which Pater's Mona Lisa passage is rendered in vers libre, and Richard Aldington's The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes (1950). The young Pound declared that Symons was one of his ‘gods’ (Tanselle 1962: 118), while Yeats addressed the link between image and the self in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’.