In 1891 he published a polemic called Le Joujou Patriotisme (Patriotism, a toy) in which he argued that France and Germany shared an aesthetic culture and urged a rapprochement between the two countries, contrary to the wishes of nationalists in the French government.

Berthe Courrière was his sole heir, inheriting a substantial body of unpublished work which she sent to his brother Jean de Gourmont, and dying within the year.

[6] Created in response to Antoine Albalat's The Art of Writing in Twenty Lessons (1899),[7] Le Problème du Style was a source book for many of the ideas that inspired the literary developments in both England and France[8] and was also admired by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in that capacity.

His novels, in particular Sixtine, explore the theme of Schopenhauerian Idealism with its emphasis on individual subjectivity, as well as the Decadent relationship between sexuality and artistic creativity.

[10] Gourmont's poetic works include Litanies de la Rose (1892), Les Saintes du Paradis (1898), and Divertissements (1912).

Pound observed in 1915 that the English Imagist poetic movement derived from the French Symbolistes,[12] Eliot describing Gourmont as the "critical conscience of his generation".