Hierophants of Decadence: Bliss Carman and Arthur Symons

Abstract

Decadence came to Canada softly, almost imperceptibly, in the 1880s, when the Confederation poet Bliss Carman published his first poems and met the English chronicler and leading poet of Decadence, Arthur Symons. The event of Decadence has gone largely unnoticed in Canada; there is no equivalent to David Weir’s Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature Against the American Grain (2008), as perhaps has been the fate of Decadence elsewhere. As a literary movement it has been, until a recent slew of publications on British Decadence, relegated to a transitional or threshold period. As Jason David Hall and Alex Murray write: ‘It is common practice to read [...] decadence as an interstitial moment in literary history, the initial “falling away” from high Victorian literary values and forms before the bona fide novelty of modernism asserted itself’. This article is, in part, an attempt to bring Canadian Decadence into focus out of its liminal state/space, and to establish Bliss Carman as the representative Canadian Decadent. To begin with, I situate the fin de siècle in Canada and examine the fruitful literary connection between Carman and Symons; then I read Carman’s poem ‘The Eavesdropper’ through a Decadent lens and continue toward an articulation of a distinctly Canadian Decadence. For the major part, I desire nothing less than to secure a foothold for Carman as the Father of Canadian Decadence.