The poetry of the period is essentially an expression of moods and sentiments. It is as much a form of impressionism as the art of Monet and Renoir. Further, it seeks after, like all the art of the nineties, that abnormality of proportion of which Bacon wrote in his ‘Essay on Beauty.’ It is, too, a period wonderfully fertile in song. Besides the nineties’ group, which is represented chiefly by the Rhymers’ Club, there were many other schools of song. Lord Alfred Douglas in his _City of the Soul_, Oscar Wilde in his _Sphinx_ and _The Harlot’s House_, Stephen Phillips and Henley, Francis Thompson in his _Hound of Heaven_, are but some of the richness I am compelled to pass over in order to adhere strictly to the programme of this rough summary. Let us, therefore, turn at once to the Rhymers’ Club, whose origin and desires have been so well explained by Arthur Symons, the cicerone to the age, in his essay on Ernest Dowson. At the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street it was arranged that a band of young poets should meet, striving to recapture in London something of the Gallic spirit of art and the charm of open discussion in the Latin Quartier. The Club consisted of the following members: John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Edwin J. Ellis, George Arthur Greene, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Cecil Hillier, Richard Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, Thomas William Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, and William Butler Yeats. Besides these members, the Club, which was without rules or officers, had at one time affiliated to itself the following permanent guests: John Gray, Edward Rose, J. T. Nettleship, Morley Roberts, A. B. Chamberlain, Edward Garnett, and William Theodore Peters. Oscar Wilde, though never a member, had a great influence on many of those who were, and Victor Plarr describes a memorable meeting of the Rhymers in Mr. Herbert Horne’s rooms in the Fitzroy settlement at which Wilde appeared. The poet goes on: ‘It was an evening of notabilities. Mr. Walter Crane stood with his back to the mantelpiece, deciding, very kindly, on the merits of our effusions. And round Oscar Wilde, not then under a cloud, hovered reverently Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, with others. This must have been in 1891, and I marvelled at the time to notice the fascination which poor Wilde exercised over the otherwise rational. He sat as it were enthroned and surrounded by a differential circle.’