Beginning with Christina Rossetti, this chapter traces the ways in which decadent women poets styled their poetics through artifice. If the poetry of the period is traditionally framed within the discourses of the sensual and phenomenological, this chapter also suggests that formal experimentation was an attempt at generating questions about the independence of art, an issue particularly important for women, who saw in the notion of art for art’s sake a form of social and political revolution. The chapter distinguishes two main poetic responses to the linguistic challenges of the fin-de-siècle period, both produced by the obsession with language’s materiality that was at the heart of decadence: the first is an ascetic style based on disciplining the word; the second an aesthetics of excess, bathed in historicism and characteristically animated by luxurious language. To illustrate these two responses, the chapter discusses the ascetic lyric poetry of Alice Meynell, and the poetics of excess of the verse dramas of Michael Field
