Wilde's poetic output, from Poems (1881/1882) and the fugitive pieces to The Sphinx (1894), preserves yet impinges upon the demarcated ‘lordly pleasure-house’ of Art (Tennyson 1989: 52); it glorifies its sequestered, literary artifice yet invests it with the excess of the senses. In what could be a self-reflexive short circuit of materialist sensuality in a tussle with the finer ideal of poetic dream, the hermaphroditic Salmacis in ‘The Burden of Itys’ – a poem which John Reed classes as Decadent (1985: 105–7) – ‘Who is not boy or girl and yet he is both’ is ‘fed by two fires’ and is ‘unsatisfied / Through their excess’ (ll. 121–3). Following the publication of Poems, in his ‘L’ Envoi’ to Rennell Rodd's Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf (1882), Wilde enunciated his departure from Ruskin, embracing art for art's sake (2005a: 31) where the focus is on ‘workmanship’ which is ‘entirely satisfying to the poetic sense’ (2005a: 54). Wilde praised Rodd's poems because they produce a purely artistic effect (2005a: 33). Wilde's introduction is self-indulgent; it not only tops the aesthetic criticism of Pater and J. A. Symonds, but regards the volume's author as his disciple, insinuating that his own Poems are the last bastion in the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poetic canon. Wilde's ‘L'Envoi’ anxiously suggests a panegyric of his own Poems. Certainly, Poems is a high-water mark of British Aestheticism; in his laudatory survey, The Æsthetic Movement in England (1882), Walter Hamilton (1844–99) placed Wilde alongside poets such as the Rossettis, Thomas Woolner, Morris, Swinburne and Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1882: 41, 95–124).

The reissue of the fifth edition of Poems in 1892 by the Bodley Head, with a new, deluxe binding featuring Charles Ricketts’ opulent, arrowlike saplings, reinstated Wilde's work as a shimmering and poisonous fin-de-siècle volume that would become a model for the publication of John Gray's Silverpoints (1893).