ABSTRACT
Wilde's equation of musical sensibility with a state of erotic experience is an evocative starting point for this essay, which examines representations of music and sexuality in British poetry of the fin de siècle. During the fin de siècle, there was considerable, disparate attention to the relations between music and sexuality. Symons, then, repeatedly employed musical allusions in his delineations of a complex, self-consciously "modem" psychological condition. Placed within his explorations of contemporary urban life, they recurrently associate music with worldly eroticism. The familiarity, even banality, of the association of the musical and the erotic by the 1890s is suggested in "The Three Musicians," one of the poems published in The Savoy by the artist and writer Aubrey Beardsley, who was, with Symons, editor of the journal. Music again differentiates between different states of erotic experience: Sappho's role as singer and musician is implicitly attributed to her greater maturity and erotic experience.
