Customer Reviews

The Symbolist Movement in Literature

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Without this little gem, we may not have ever had T. S. Eliot emerge as fully as he has. When I first stumbled across this book, I went through one of my deepest awakenings and haven't stopped since. The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a must for any concerned with poetry and the poetic process. There is a common thread in poetry that has been carried from ancient Greece to the present (though deeply buried now) and one of its strongest showings occurs with the writers reported on in this book. Symons does not get super scholastic (partly because scholars and the modern scholarly anathema wasn't as menacing of a problem as it is now) but he treats the writers and their material as one with the wide-eyed wonder of a quiet witness to one of the most remarkable periods in ALL of literature.

Symons was a poet and critic of the Symbolist movement, and this book was meant to be a general introduction to the French Symbolists. As an introduction, it is superb--it familiarized me with the works, lives, and styles of many important Symbolist writers such as Nerval, Merimee, Villiers, Verlaine, etc. There is an appendix which includes writers that aren't really Symbolist, like Flaubert, Balzac, Goncourt, but even this appendix is informative and interesting.

However, when the work tries to go beyond a mere descriptive primer, it fails. His attempts to define Symbolism are muddled and contradictory. His "interpretations" of Rimbaud and Verlaine are just completely off base. Basically, this book is a light, basic introduction to French Symbolist authors, and it loses its charms when it tries to be critical or definitive.

I enjoyed this author's poetic brilliance in discussing the relation between a symbol and the infinite. What I did not realize, when I purchased the book, is that it is substantially a collection of essays on particular authors: Balzac. Jusmans, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Flaubert, etc.

In all of the critical fog & political baggage that has since attached itself to the Symbolists, it is refreshing to read a contemporary's account of this fascinating artistic period. Symons wasn't an ivory tower academic, (he lived the "art for art's sake" life championed by the Decadents & Symbolists to the point of mental collapse), but few critics were as close to the circle of important writers of the 1880s & '90s as he was. His criticisms were not the speculations of a reader, but more nearly reportage culled from his own associations & early championing of the milieu the Symbolists sprang from. Pick up his letters or Karl Beckson's excellent biography & you'll see what I mean. Symons was uniquely positioned to shine a light on a movement that consciously wrapped itself in mystery. This is a must-read introduction for anyone interested in the period.