Imperial Shame, Magnificent Decay: Decadent Poetics and the Colonial West Indies

Abstract

In the introduction to The Poet of Guiana, a selection of works by Walter MacArthur Lawrence published posthumously in 1948, the editor, Patrick H. Daly, identifies Lawrence as ‘the leader of the Aesthetic movement in Guiana because of the high regard he had for literary purity as such’. Daly praises Lawrence, who was born in British Guiana 1896 and died in 1942, as ‘the most intellectual and urbane Guianese poet of his generation’, known for his ‘chaste, strenuous, athletically supple and pure verse’. And though Lawrence was ‘prone to excess emotional fervour and long, complex sentences […] his poetry generally has euphony’. Daly describes Lawrence’s talent as being ‘like a delicately strung instrument: the higher it is the deeper is its possessor’s sensitivity’. While Daly stipulates that ‘hypersensitivity’ in an artist is abnormal, he echoes Walter Pater by defending Lawrence on the grounds of ‘temperament’. Lawrence’s ‘sensitivity claimed as its ancestry merely the artist’s temperament […]. He would have been less than an artist – and more than an artist – had his art not been agonised by profound sensitivity’.[i] In describing Lawrence as an artist agonized by sensitivity but not hypersensitive, graceful yet prone to emotional excess, Daly locates Lawrence’s poetry on the line between aestheticism and decadence, between refinement and an abnormal over-refinement. This is a distinction Daly affirms by identifying Lawrence with the virtuosity of Algernon Charles Swinburne while disavowing Swinburne’s more scandalous traits:

We consider Lawrence to have been the first of the moderns in this country, but his contact with the final, spiritual moments of Victorianism, and the influence of his masters, Swinburne (that is Swinburne’s desirably effective orchestration without Swinburne’s irreligion) and Wordsworth, gave him strength and uniformity.[ii]

[i] P. H. Daly, [Biography], in Walter MacArthur Lawrence,The Poet of Guiana, Walter MacArthur Lawrence: Selected Works, ed. by P. H. Daly (Georgetown: Daily Chronicle, 1948), pp. 5-17 (p. 8).

[ii] Ibid., p. 9.