‘The clouds are grand pianos’: Derek Mahon’s The Yellow Book and Neo-Victorian Decadence

Abstract

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets writing in English seem to have dedicated very scant attention to the Yellow Book’s literary theory, poetical practice, and textual politics. However, between the 1960s and 2020, an important Irish poet nourished and literarized a strong and competent interest in the so-called ‘Decadent Dilemma’. His name was Derek Mahon (1941-2020) and his poetical re-readings of the ‘Decadent Dilemma’ materialized, above all, in two noteworthy and, in a way, diachronically and semiotically complementary poetical works:

1. a) the early poem ‘Dowson and Company’, n. 3 in the poetry collection Night-crossing (1968) and n. 2 in his Poems 1962-1978 (1979) with no textual changes, and the more inclusive and encyclopaedic microtitle The Poets of the Nineties;
2. b) the later organic and panoramic poetry sequence The Yellow Book, published autonomously in 1997 and significantly revised in 2021 to be included in his posthumous and testamentary Poems 1961-2020 with the unmistakable macrotitle Decadence.

Mahon’s competent articulation of neo-Victorian decadence in Yellow Book is definitively personalized and authenticated by how he poeticizes some textualizations of intersemiosis. What is unusually coherent, organic, and programmatic in the contextural counterpoint of its macrotext and microtexts is the creatively intensive adoption of musico-literary intersemioticity, i.e. that between literary systems and musical systems.