19th century AD

Still regarded as one of the most striking of the Rhymers' Club cohort is that melancholy Scot of philosophic turn and strong Nietzschean bent, John Davidson, author of the celebrated poem of intense social concern, 'Thirty Bob a Week'. His work was lauded by D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot and suo 'il miglior fabbro', Ezra Pound. It was Davidson who ignited, too, the youthful imagination of his fellow-Caledonian, the firebrand Hugh MacDiarmid.

Nor among the men of the fin de siecle were Dowson and Davidson sole creditors of Eliot's. 'I myself,' he wrote, 'owe Mr. Symons a great debt. But for having read his book [The Symbolist Movement in Literature] I should not . . . have heard of Laforgue and Rimbaud. I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine, and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbiere.'

It is apparent, then, that the influence of the Decadent poets has persisted well into the century now moving towards its close. As for the Counter-Decadents . . . who today reads the imperialist bombinations, and abominations, of Henley - crept back into the night that covered him? Tongues at least may still relish the rolling periods and hearty exhortations, the fulminations and fatal facilities, of doughty old Henley's comrade in arms, Rudyard Kipling.

Une autre chose is Housman, the recluse of Whewell Court, sexual summer voyager to le Continent and its boyish freedoms. He still musters appreciation; the breeze that blows from Bredon yet rustles many a lad's poetic fancy.

Another frail - yet staunch - survivor from the Nineties is Francis Thompson. No aesthete, but his own man. His 'Hound of Heaven' most assuredly pursues us still, down twentieth-century nights and days. The very embodiment of the poete maudit, one sees him eternally through the sage eye of Gaunt:

His favourite haunt in his later years was the gloomy waste of Kilburn's bricks and mortar. Dying slowly of consumption, he would sit, holding out tremulous hands to the fire in the Skiddaw public house at the corner of Elgin Avenue and the Chippenham Road. . . . 'Once step aside,' he said, 'from the ways of comfortable men and you cannot regain them. You will live and die under the law of the intolerable thing called romance.'

Beyond the fatal pale, too, roamed Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, poets of the Nineties who defied, outlived, the nonagesimal malignity, which, to my thinking, bears more than passing resemblance to the much vaunted, highly dubious, curse of Tutankhamen.

Among the vanished, the mortal casualties, must be counted Stephen Phillips. Compared with Shakespeare in his day, his name, golden-laureated, shone once so brilliantly from the fresh green-ribbed covers of the uniform editions of his shoal of volumes of verse and poetic dramas, emerging in crisp sheaves from the vast barn of the Bodley Head - only to end up, a couple of decades later, in the booksellers' penny boxes. Less worthy, but far better remembered - for his Great War anthem, 'For the Fallen' - is Phillips' cousin, Laurence Binyon.