"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 …

…the canon, that the art of the dead writers is precisely "that which we know." (4) (1) The Decay of Lying (p. 1086), Wilde, Oscar, "A collection of critical essays", ed. Richard Ellman, 1969. (2) The Picture of Dorian Gray, Preface, (p. 3), Wilde, Oscar, ed. Wordsworth Classics. (3) The Artist as Critic, (p. 1127), Wilde, Oscar, "A collection of critical essays", ed. Richard Ellman, 1969. (4) Tradition and Individual Talent, (pp. 24-31), T.S.Eliot, "The penguin book of Twentieth-Century Essays", ed. Penguin books.