Decadents

Group of poets of the end of the 19th century, including some French Symbolists (see Symbolist movement), notably Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, and the later generation of England's Aesthetic movement (see Aestheticism), notably Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde.

Many nonpoets, including the novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans and the artist Aubrey Beardsley, are also often associated with the Decadents. The Decadents emphasized art for art's sake (see Walter Pater), seeing it as autonomous and opposed to nature and to the materialistic preoccupations of industrialized society, and therefore stressed the bizarre, incongruous, and artificial in both their work and their lives.

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