In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Rhymers' Club

  • Introduction
  • Anthologies and Collections
  • The Fin de Siècle
  • Aestheticism and Decadence
  • Publishing and Book History
  • W. B. Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival
Back to top

Victorian Literature Rhymers' Club
by
Megan Girdwood
  • LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0215

Introduction

The Rhymers’ Club was a group of loosely affiliated poets who convened at pub off Fleet Street, the Old Cheshire Cheese, among other locations, between 1890 and 1896 (though the exact dates are disputed). Its membership was exclusively male, and the group’s semi-regular meetings were attended by both official members and invited guests, who gathered to eat dinner, drink ale, discuss the state of English poetry, and listen to readings of one another’s work. In one of several accounts, the group, initially called the “Rhymesters’ Club,” was founded by W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, and T.W. Rolleston, who sought to create a space for emerging poets unconstrained by any ideological manifesto or program. Over the years, other members included Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Radford, John Gray, Edwin Ellis, and John Todhunter, with occasional visits by Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas when meetings were held in private homes. The group published two collections with the Bodley Head, The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) and The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894), which varied widely in theme and style and were ambivalently received as a collective effort, though certain poets were commended for their technical virtuosity. Yeats, the group’s most influential voice, saw it as Celtic in its social outlook and English in its literary impulses, responding in part to Walter Pater and the tradition of English Aestheticism. His retrospective portrait of a Tragic Generation ensconced in the atmosphere of Decadence, symbolized by the premature deaths of poets like Dowson and Johnson, created a mythology around the Rhymers and shaped much of the early scholarship on the group. The Club’s intellectual climate was influenced in part by the model of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as well as the personal mentorship Pater had provided to members including Johnson and Symons. Although they were heterogeneous in their poetic styles, many of the Rhymers were concerned with the relationship of art to life and the insights that might be gained from the cultivation of sensuous experience. The group also had a self-identified “regional” makeup, with poets of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish heritage. The entries included in the following sections reflect the range of scholarly approaches to the Rhymers’ Club, from biographical and historical perspectives to more recent contributions in studies of Decadence, fin-de-siècle poetics, and London literary networks.

General Overviews

Histories of the Rhymers’ Club, and especially of its origins, are miscellaneous and contested. For the sake of clarity, this section is divided into two sections: primary materials written by members of the group, and secondary materials composed by literary scholars from the mid-twentieth century onward.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.

How to Subscribe

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.

Article

Up

Down