"Oscar Wilde and T.S. Elliot on Tradition and Influence"

Oscar Wilde's outlook on tradition can be best understood in the context of his strong ties to the Decadent poets, a movement in which Romantic attraction to whatever produced the sharpest sensation became a cult of perversity and degeneration. Their emphasis was on the importance of art for its own sake. Art must be independent of moral and social concerns, they believed, and must concentrate on style above all else. The inspiration for Decadent art was to be found in aestheticism, the cultivation of an ideal art, a new form of beauty - leading to the extreme pole of Dandyism. Decadent po…