Reading was one of Debussy’s favourite occupations, without doubt one of the activities that nourished and sustained him the most. Still, any attempt to uncover greater detail about the kind of reader Debussy actually was, remains a complicated, almost archaeological task. Although the sale of scores, manuscripts and several books sent to Debussy offers some leads, it does not make it possible to reconstruct their precise importance or to show their full diversity. In order to understand Debussy’s literary inclinations as fully as possible, it is thus necessary to examine other sources, such as letters, books sent to him, testimonies of friends, as well as the diaries and notebooks that have been miraculously preserved – notably those in which he noted references to works likely to interest him and even specific sentences that he particularly liked. By cross-checking these various elements, I sketch a portrait of a composer through one of his most essential passions.

This chapter considers Michael Field within the context of nineteenth-century decadence. Drawing on Michael Field’s diaries and poetry, it contextualises their continuing interest in key figures of French decadence, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Paul Verlaine, alongside the broader vogue for decadence in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. While Michael Field claimed to deride decadence, an attention to the influence of French decadence in their works illustrates the extent to which they were poetic innovators, responsive to contemporary fashions, and a part of a longer tradition of writers and artists, such as Arthur Symons, Walter Pater, and Aubrey Beardsley, who drew on the fruitful possibilities of decadent concepts in their works.

Michael Field are remembered for their poetic works, but they also wrote short prose. Focusing on their collection of prose sketches or ‘croquis’ entitled For That Moment Only, this chapter sets their prose writings in the wider context of the fin-de-siècle trends towards the short story and aesthetic essay. Through analysis of stories like ‘A Maenad’, the chapter outlines Michael Field’s affinities with New Woman prose writers like George Egerton, as well as their affinities with decadent aesthetes like Oscar Wilde. Ultimately, this chapter shows that attending to Michael Field’s prose works as well as their poetry provides a more accurate picture of their distinct contribution to turn-of-the-century literary culture.

Boulez’s status as a modern is rarely doubted. Yet he provided relatively little by way of explicit reflection on the concept of modernity. This chapter traces a path via Charles Baudelaire’s formulation in his essay, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, and Michel Foucault’s commentary on it, to Foucault’s essay on Boulez himself, ‘Pierre Boulez, ou l’écran traversé’. There, Boulez is seen as motivated by ‘the necessity of a conjuncture’, an imperative for action demanded by whatever nexus of circumstances and contradictions confronts the individual in the present. The conjuncture, as further amplified by Louis Althusser, offers useful perspectives on Boulez’s modernity, which is often characterised as prescriptive and deterministic but which emerges here as relativist and perspectival, stressing contingency rather than inevitability. Above all, modernity comes to signify not a binding aesthetic but an enduring ethic, whose manifestations remain particular to the historical and problem contexts in which they arise.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

This chapter examines the reception of Decadence in Britain by focusing on responses to the poet Paul Verlaine. For many Anglophone readers Verlaine epitomized Decadence, but comment upon his work is hedged by euphemism and ambiguity. I argue that this reflects the ‘queer’ resonance of Decadence for British readers, encompassing Verlaine’s status as a homosexual poet and, more generally, the power of Decadent writing to question and unsettle received knowledge (including sexual norms). The chapter traces the origins of the term ‘Decadence’ through classical historiography to the work of Charles Baudelaire and its transition across the Channel in the 1890s, as writers including Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, John Gray and Michael Field absorbed the influence of Baudelaire’s literary successors, J. K. Huysmans and Verlaine, into their own work. Symons’ description of Decadence as a ‘new and beautiful and interesting disease’ helpfully draws together what British readers found so appealing and so disturbing about Decadence – its continental origins, its association with various kinds of transgression and its capacity to revitalize clichéd ways of thinking.