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Eliot claimed to have bypassed the "diffuse," "Romantic," "effeminate" British Decadent legacy that had privileged "sound" over "concrete image" in favor of French urban poets such as Charles Baudelaire or Jules Laforgue.' And perhaps because modernism so successfully rid itself of A. C. Swinburne's infectious aural traits, critics have not recognized the profound visual impact of his pagan "natural" landscapes on modem urban/ war poetry. In an age defined by world war and large scale technology, Swinburne's Decadent images of drowning and stormshattered bodies accrued new iconic significance. Far from projecting Utopian "romantic" visions of lost "unity," the Decadent's Sapphic sublime of elemental obliteration-surfacing initially in H.D. s (and Pounds) imagist, floral bodies whirled by a maelstrom of forces-dramatized at once modernity's keenly shattering intensity and a correspondent awareness of corporeal fragility.^ It has become a commonplace that Eliot's Baudelairian "Fourmillante cité" reflects back the alienated "etherized" modem subject. However, by contrast, Swinbumian pagan sites of death by drowning and snowstorm frequently stage spectacles oi an Eliotic numbed body stung into sharp, percipient, erotic self-realization by the metropolis, world war, and technology. Thus in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock's" concluding Swinbumian turn "seaward," modernity awakens the speaker into acute erotic sentience-"human voices wake us, and we drown"-from the bodily/perceptual haze of its overtly urban sections.3 Images spinning out the "chilled delirium" and "beauty in terror" denied to a sensually deprived Gerontion who never "fought in the warm rain" propel the downed gull across Belle Isles "windy straits" to its Swinbumian-Sapphic death by crystal, "white feathers in the snow" (CPf) 21, 23). Tim Armstrong argues in Modernism, Technology and the Body that technology renders the body supersensual/ And Walter Benjamin s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" taken in tandem with "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" imply that under the pressures of modernity's life-threatening stimuli, all modes of perception-erotic, aesthetic, visionary-become predicated on "shock."5 Further, Benjamins choice of Baudelaire (Swinburne s master) as the lyric poet who best incorporates a shock-aesthetic capable of competing with film's blitzing medium, prescribes a modem poetics based on Decadent self-shattering structures of eros and imaginative self-realization. Thus Benjamin alludes to Baudelaire's equation of "the creative process" with a "duel" "in which the artist, just...