A literary trend of thought that began in the late19th century and then became popular in many western capitalist countries. When modern capitalism turns into monopoly stage, social unrest and contradictions become increasingly serious, people lose confidence in the future and begin to dislike the civilization of capitalist society, forming a general spiritual crisis of decline, decadence and pessimism. Decadent literary trend of thought is the reflection of this social spiritual crisis in the field of literature and art. Decadence, as a historical category in artistic aesthetics, has a wide range of connotations, generally referring to many western modern literary schools from late symbolism to surrealism.
/kloc-In the mid-9th century, the French Bahners School of Poetry advocated that poetry should be divorced from society and politics, and deliberately pursue formal aesthetic feeling, with many negative and decadent contents, which can be regarded as the origin of decadence. Baudelaire, Bo Han, Wei Erlun, maeterlinck, Eliot and many other symbolist poets in Britain, as well as later schools of expressionism, futurism, abstraction and surrealism, all developed decadent aesthetic tendencies in theory and practice, which once had international influence. The same characteristics of the decadent school are that they all flaunt "art for art's sake", deny the cognitive value and educational function of art, deny the traditional realism, have more hatred and dissatisfaction with the real society, and put the subjective feelings of the subject above the objective world. As balmont, a Russian decadent poet, said, "I hate human beings, and I want to run away from them as soon as possible." My only motherland is my cold soul. "They emphasize the expressive function of art, trying to express personal feelings, impulses and emotions with the help of abstract anti-traditional art forms, and even the truth of mental trauma and abnormal psychology, and want to regard' pure art' as an ark in the boundless sea of their spiritual crisis. Death, dying and mysterious things have also become their important content, and death, blood, deformity, ugliness, illusion, intuition, imagery and grotesque have become the themes of their poems. Most of the works are gloomy and obscure, full of negativity, decadence and mystery. Excessive anti-tradition, anti-rationality and excessive indulgence of subjective arbitrariness have obviously deviated from the "law of beauty." As a complex literary phenomenon in the western capitalist world, this trend of thought has its duality of negativity and progressiveness in ideological connotation and artistic form, so we should adopt a scientific analytical attitude.