Decadent style celebrates aesthetic pleasure, sensuality, and decline, often opposing moral seriousness. Language is ornate and deliberately artificial. This style appears in poetry as a response to cultural fatigue, embracing beauty and transgression in the face of perceived social decay.

Decadent style embraces artifice and pleasure while flirting with decline: lush description, self-conscious pose, erotic or morbid imagery, and a fascination with beauty as something fragile or corruptible. It often resists moral instruction, foregrounding aesthetic experience. In analysis, look for precious diction, exotic references, and the performance of weariness or ennui. In creative use, treat the poem as a crafted object: polish sound, choose sensual images, and let moral ambiguity remain unresolved. Discuss how decadence can critique bourgeois norms by exaggerating refinement into excess.