DECADENCE, the brilliant behemoth that destroys Authenticity. The Decadents in France, Huysmans, Mallarme and Verlaine. These poets and novelist prescribe that reality is meant to portray all of the excess that exists within the wildly Earthly bounds of the bourgeoisie prosodically. Against Nature by Huysmans describes the French Republic as a hellhole to retreat from. Verlaine and Mallarme's poetry treats the subject of the Republic of France as a world in which the vagrants and conmen rule— Decadence exists as a Philosophical pretext to all Naturalist and Surrealist literature in the 19th and 20th Century. If it were not for Edgar Allan Poe's Poetry, especially his poem Spirits of the Dead, The Raven, and Israfel we would not currently exist in the Literary movement of today. Poe is on of the few responsible for the literature of the 19th-20th-- and hilariously 21st centuries. All poets of America; France; England and Russia, with the special exception of Germany and Italy in certain regards, ( Italy: who had Pound and Marinetti; Pound inarguably influenced by Poe as an American, Marinetti arguably influenced by the writing of Poe by his work in French newspapers prior to the Second World War; and Germany with Rilke, Ernst Junger and Walter Benjamin who's early educational career included Poe's Completed Works. Source:
https://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1978209.htm). Poe's influence in the writing of Decadency spans his poetry into his Short Stories, even the well-known ones. The Tell-Tale Heart tells of a man living a perfect life who cuts it short because he is paranoid of his neighboring tenant's dead eye staring into the blank heart and soul he has. Take from this what you will, but the object of decadence in this short story is undeniable. A man living a purely selfish lifestyle, cuts it short by reasoning that the only way to continue it without obstacles is to kill the man who he is living with. Decadence in this way is portrayed as a solipsistic, self-destructive psychopathy. No one in reality would murder their neighboring tenant because they have a dead-eye, but the main character and narrator of the story does for the exact reasons outlined. He is haunted by the imperfection of this man's constant staring, if there hasn't ever been a much more grandiose takedown of the object of Decadence, I
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