Rhymers' Club
Quick answer: The Rhymers' Club was a 1890s London circle of poets, Yeats among them, who met at the Cheshire Cheese to read verse. Its members, mood and legacy.
The Rhymers' Club was a group of poets who met in London in the 1890s, founded around 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys, to read new poems aloud over supper, most famously in an upstairs room of the Cheshire Cheese, an old pub off Fleet Street. Members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons and Richard Le Gallienne, and the group published two anthologies of members' verse in 1892 and 1894.
The club distilled the mood of the English fin de siècle: art for art's sake, short perfect lyrics, weariness worn like a buttonhole flower. Yeats later mythologised his companions as a tragic generation, and through him the club became a bridge between Victorian poetry and modern verse.
History and Key Figures
The Rhymers reacted against the public, preachy side of Victorian poetry. Where Tennyson addressed the nation, they polished small lyrics about love, loss and autumn twilight, influenced by French Symbolism and by Walter Pater's gospel of intense private experience. Dowson wrote hauntingly musical poems of hopeless devotion; Johnson, a scholarly Catholic convert, produced austere, chiselled stanzas; Symons carried French Decadence into English criticism.
The tragic reputation is earned: Dowson died at thirty-two, Johnson at thirty-five, and several others fell to drink, poverty or despair. Yeats outlived nearly all of them and turned their memory into some of his finest prose and elegy.
What Rhymers' Club Poetry Sounds Like
Think of a short rhymed lyric, exquisitely finished, in a minor key. Its subjects are twilight, faded love, wine, the mask of the performer. Rhetoric and moralising are banished; the poem aims to be a made object, a mood caught in a vial. An invented specimen of the manner: 'The lamps are lit; the little hour is ours; / we spend it talking of the vanished flowers.' The music is deliberate, the emotional temperature low but persistent.
How to Use Their Lessons
The Rhymers teach the value of the small perfect thing. Set yourself their standard for one month: only short lyrics, every rhyme exact, every syllable weighed, no explaining. The discipline of reading work aloud to peers is equally worth copying; a poem that survives a room of fellow poets has passed a real test. Their cautionary lesson is narrowness. A single register, however refined, becomes a cage, which is why Yeats, the member who grew, is the member we still read.
What poets can take from this
- Practise the short finished lyric; eight flawless lines teach more than eighty loose ones.
- Read your drafts aloud to other writers regularly, as the Rhymers did weekly.
- Cut every line that explains the mood instead of creating it.
- Study Dowson for musical phrasing and Yeats's early lyrics for atmosphere.
- Master one register, then deliberately leave it; refinement should be a stage, not a home.
Try it yourself
Write an eight-line rhymed lyric set entirely in the last ten minutes of an evening with friends, capturing the mood without ever naming an emotion.
Questions
Who founded the Rhymers' Club?
W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys brought the group together around 1890 in London. Its best-remembered members include Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and Arthur Symons.
Why did Yeats call the Rhymers the tragic generation?
Because so many died young or fell into ruin: Dowson at thirty-two, Johnson at thirty-five, others lost to drink and poverty. Yeats's memoirs shaped this image of doomed, dedicated artists.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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