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“THE HECTIC BEAUTY OF DECAY”: POSITIVIST DECADENCE IN MATHILDE BLIND'S LATE POETRY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2006

James Diedrick
James Diedrick
Affiliation:
Agnes Scott College
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Extract

Wan mists enwrap the still-born day;

The harebell withers on the heath,

And all the moorland seems to breathe

The hectic beauty of decay.

—Mathilde Blind, “The Evening of the Year,” Songs and Sonnets

To again invoke the organic metaphor at the root of decadence, what is crucial about the notion of decay is not so much the change from a greater to a lesser state, but the changing itself.

—David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

[T]he aim of decadence, whether in science or art, is to challenge the limits that mark some forms of knowledge as permissible and others as forbidden, regardless of the results.

—Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment”

Type
Decadence and Endings
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 2006 , pp. 631 - 648
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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