Symbolism (arts)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art

movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin
in poetry and other arts.

In literature, the style originates with the 1857

publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs
du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which
Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into
French, were a significant influence and the
source of many stock tropes and images. The
aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé
and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s.
In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a
series of manifestos and attracted a generation
of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first
applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented
the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the La Mort et le Fossoyeur ("Death and the
related Decadents of literature and of art. gravedigger", c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a
visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The
Distinct from, but related to, the style of angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic
poses of the characters all express symbolist
literature, symbolism in art is related to the longings for transfiguration “anywhere, out of the
gothic component of Romanticism and world.”

Impressionism.

Etymology
The term "symbolism" is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from the Latin
symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical
Greek σύμβολον symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the
carriers were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon was a
shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to
the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance.

Precursors and origins

Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which
were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and
the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the
imagination, and dreams.[1] Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as
naturalists before becoming symbolists; for Huysmans, this change represented his
increasing interest in religion and spirituality. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the
Decadents represent naturalist interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case this
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was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the world-weariness characteristic of the fin de
siècle period.

The Symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French
literary style that immediately preceded it. While being influenced by hermeticism, allowing
freer versification, and rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained
Parnassianism's love of word play and concern for the musical qualities of verse. The
Symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier's motto of "art for art's sake", and
retained – and modified – Parnassianism's mood of ironic detachment. [2] Many Symbolist
poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, published early works in Le
Parnasse contemporain, the poetry anthologies that gave Parnassianism its name. But
Arthur Rimbaud publicly mocked prominent Parnassians and published scatological
parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée – misattributed to
Coppée himself – in L'Album zutique.[3]

One of Symbolism's most colourful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic (and
occultist) Joséphin Péladan, who established the Salon de la Rose + Croix. The Salon
hosted a series of six presentations of avant-garde art, writing and music during the 1890s,
to give a presentation space for artists embracing spiritualism, mysticism, and idealism in
their work. A number of Symbolists were associated with the Salon.

Movement

The Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described
indirectly. Thus, they wrote in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing
particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. Jean Moréas published the Symbolist
Manifesto ("Le Symbolisme") in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886 (see 1886 in poetry). The
Symbolist Manifesto names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine
as the three leading poets of the movement. Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile
to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description", and
that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in
itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal."

Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les
phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences
sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales.

(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will
not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to
represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)[4]

In a nutshell, as Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Cazalis, 'to depict not the thing but
the effect it produces'.[5]

Techniques

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The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of
versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity",
and as such were sympathetic with the trend toward
free verse, as evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn
and Ezra Pound. Symbolist poems were attempts to
evoke, rather than primarily to describe; symbolic
imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's
soul. T. S. Eliot was influenced by the poets Jules
Laforgue, Paul Valéry and Arthur Rimbaud who used
the techniques of the Symbolist school,[6] though it has
also been said that 'Imagism' was the style to which
both Pound and Eliot subscribed (see Pound's Des
Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, precursor
Imagistes). Synesthesia was a prized experience; of the symbolist style, c. 1862
poets sought to identify and confound the separate
senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
– Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,
Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

(There are perfumes that are fresh like children's flesh,

sweet like oboes, green like meadows
– And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,
having the expansiveness of infinite things,
like amber, musc, benzoin, and incense,
which sing of the raptures of the soul and senses.)

and Rimbaud's poem Voyelles:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles…

(A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels…)

– both poets seek to identify one sense experience with another. The earlier Romanticism
of poetry used symbols, but these symbols were unique and privileged objects. The
symbolists were more extreme, investing all things, even vowels and perfumes, with
potential symbolic value. "The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a
privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much
as a superior network of associations."[8] Symbolist symbols are not allegories, intended to
represent; they are instead intended to evoke particular states of mind. The nominal
subject of Mallarmé's "Le cygne" ("The Swan") is of a swan trapped in a frozen lake.
Significantly, in French, cygne is a homophone of signe, a sign. The overall effect is of
overwhelming whiteness; and the presentation of the narrative elements of the description
is quite indirect:

Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd'hui

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Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre…
(The virgin, lively, and beautiful today – will it tear for us this hard forgotten lake that lurks
beneath the frost, the transparent glacier of flights not taken with a blow from a drunken
wing? A swan of long ago remembers that it is he, magnificent but without hope, who
breaks free…)

Paul Verlaine and the poètes maudits

Of the several attempts at defining the essence of symbolism, perhaps none was more
influential than Paul Verlaine's 1884 publication of a series of essays on Tristan Corbière,
Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gérard de Nerval,
and "Pauvre Lelian" ("Poor Lelian", an anagram of Paul Verlaine's own name), each of
whom Verlaine numbered among the poètes maudits, "accursed poets."

Verlaine argued that in their individual and very

different ways, each of these hitherto neglected
poets found genius a curse; it isolated them from
their contemporaries, and as a result these
poets were not at all concerned to avoid
hermeticism and idiosyncratic writing styles.[9]
They were also portrayed as at odds with
Eugen Bracht, The Shore of Oblivion, 1889
society, having tragic lives, and often given to
self-destructive tendencies. These traits were
not hindrances but consequences of their literary gifts. Verlaine's concept of the poète
maudit in turn borrows from Baudelaire, who opened his collection Les fleurs du mal with
the poem Bénédiction, which describes a poet whose internal serenity remains undisturbed
by the contempt of the people surrounding him.[10]

In this conception of genius and the role of the poet, Verlaine referred indirectly to the
aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who maintained that the
purpose of art was to provide a temporary refuge from the world of strife of the will.[11]

Philosophy
Schopenhauer's aesthetics represented shared concerns with the symbolist programme;
they both tended to consider Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and will.
As a result of this desire for an artistic refuge, the symbolists used characteristic themes of
mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense of the malign
power of sexuality, which Albert Samain termed a "fruit of death upon the tree of life."[12]
Mallarmé's poem Les fenêtres[13] expresses all of these themes clearly. A dying man in a
hospital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of his physical surroundings,
turns toward his window but then turns away in disgust from

… l'homme à l'âme dure

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Vautré dans le bonheur, où ses seuls appétits
Mangent, et qui s'entête à chercher cette ordure
Pour l'offrir à la femme allaitant ses petits, …

(… the hard-souled man,

Wallowing in happiness, where only his appetites
Feed, and who insists on seeking out this filth
To offer to the wife suckling his children, …)

and in contrast, he "turns his back on life" (tourne l’épaule à la vie) and he exclaims:

Je me mire et me vois ange! Et je meurs, et j'aime

– Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité –
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!

(I marvel at myself, I seem an angel! and I die, and I love

– Whether the glass might be art, or mysticism –
To be reborn, bearing my dream as a diadem,
Under that former sky where Beauty once flourished!)

Symbolists and decadents

The symbolist style has frequently been confused with decadence. Several young writers
were derisively referred to by the press as "decadent" during the mid-1880s. A few of these
writers embraced the term while most avoided it. Jean Moréas' manifesto was largely a
response to this polemic. By the late 1880s, the terms "symbolism" and "decadence" were
understood to be almost synonymous.[14] Though the aesthetics of the styles can be
considered similar in some ways, the two remain distinct. The symbolists were those artists
who emphasized dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated précieux, ornamented, or
hermetic styles, and morbid subject matters.[15] The subject of the decadence of the Roman
Empire was a frequent source of literary images and appears in the works of many poets of
the period, regardless of which name they chose for their style, as in Verlaine's
"Langueur":[16]

Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la Décadence,

Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse.
(I am the Empire at the end of the decadence, who watches the large, white barbarians
passing, while composing lazy acrostic poems in a gilded style in which the languor of the
sun dances.)

Periodical literature

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A number of important literary publications were
founded by symbolists or became associated
with the style. The first was La Vogue initiated in
April 1886. In October of that same year, Jean
Moréas, Gustave Kahn, and Paul Adam began
the periodical Le Symboliste. One of the most
important symbolist journals was Mercure de Victor Vasnetsov, The Knight at the Crossroads,
France, edited by Alfred Vallette, which 1878

succeeded La Pléiade; founded in 1890, this

periodical endured until 1965. Pierre Louÿs

Rémy de Gourmont and Félix Fénéon were literary critics associated with symbolism. The
symbolist and decadent literary styles were satirized by a book of poetry, Les
Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, published in 1885 by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel
Vicaire.[17]

Russian symbolism
Primary influences on the style of Russian Symbolism were the irrationalistic and mystical
poetry and philosophy of Fyodor Tyutchev and Vladimir Solovyov, the novels of Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, the operas of Richard Wagner, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and
Friedrich Nietzsche, French symbolist and decadent poets (such as Stéphane Mallarmé,
Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire), and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen.

The style was largely inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article The Ancient Debate (1884)
and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in
Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism and
the act of creation. Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on
god-men, among whom he counted Christ, Joan of Arc, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci,
Napoleon, and (later) Hitler. His wife, Zinaida Gippius, also a major poet of early
symbolism, opened a salon in St Petersburg, which came to be known as the
"headquarters of Russian decadence". Andrei Bely's Petersburg (novel) a portrait of the
social strata of the Russian capital, is frequently cited as a late example of Symbolism in
20th century Russian literature.

In other media

Visual arts
Symbolism in literature is distinct from symbolism in art although the two were similar in
many aspects. In painting, symbolism can be seen as a revival of some mystical
tendencies in the Romantic tradition, and was close to the self-consciously morbid and
private decadent movement.

There were several rather dissimilar groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, which
included Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Jacek
Malczewski, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Gaston
Bussière, Edvard Munch, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop. Symbolism in painting was even
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more widespread geographically than symbolism in poetry, affecting Mikhail Vrubel,
Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Léon Bakst,
Elena Gorokhova in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios
Varo, Morris Graves and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin is
sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.

The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by
symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal,
private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art,
symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.[11]

Music
Symbolism had some influence on music as well. Many symbolist writers and critics were
early enthusiasts of the music of Richard Wagner, an avid reader of Schopenhauer.

The symbolist aesthetic affected the works of

Claude Debussy. His choices of libretti, texts,
and themes come almost exclusively from the
symbolist canon. Compositions such as his
settings of Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire,
various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the
opera Pelléas et Mélisande with a libretto by
Maurice Maeterlinck, and his unfinished
John William Waterhouse, Saint Cecilia, 1895
sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, The
Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of
Usher, all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by symbolist themes and tastes.
His best known work, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, was inspired by Mallarmé's
poem, L'après-midi d'un faune.

The symbolist aesthetic also influenced Aleksandr Scriabin's compositions. Arnold

Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire takes its text from German translations of the symbolist
poems by Albert Giraud, showing an association between German expressionism and
symbolism. Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salomé, based on the play by Oscar Wilde, uses
a subject frequently depicted by symbolist artists.

Prose fiction
Symbolism's style of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did
to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours (English title: Against Nature)
explored many themes that became associated with the symbolist aesthetic. This novel, in
which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric,
reclusive antihero. Oscar Wilde imitated the novel in several passages of The Picture of
Dorian Gray.

Paul Adam was the most prolific and most representative author of symbolist novels.Les
Demoiselles Goubert (1886), co-written with Jean Moréas, is an important transitional work
between naturalism and symbolism. Few symbolists used this form. One exception was
Gustave Kahn, who published Le Roi fou in 1896. In 1892, Georges Rodenbach wrote the
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short novel Bruges-la-morte, set in the Flemish town of Bruges, which Rodenbach
described as a dying, medieval city of mourning and quiet contemplation: in a typically
symbolist juxtaposition, the dead city contrasts with the diabolical re-awakening of sexual
desire.[18] The cynical, misanthropic, misogynistic fiction of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is
sometimes considered symbolist, as well. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the
symbolist manner.

Theatre
The characteristic emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies have made
symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent trends. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-
Adam's drama Axël (rev. ed. 1890) is a definitive symbolist play. In it, two Rosicrucian
aristocrats become enamored of each other while trying to kill each other, only to agree to
commit suicide mutually because nothing in life could equal their fantasies. From this play,
Edmund Wilson adopted the title Axel's Castle for his influential study of the symbolist
literary aftermath.

Maurice Maeterlinck, also a symbolist playwright, wrote The Blind (1890), The Intruder
(1890), Interior (1891), Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), and The Blue Bird (1908). Eugénio
de Castro is considered one of the introducers of Symbolism in the Iberian Peninsula. He
wrote Belkiss, "dramatic prose-poem" as he called it, about the doomed passion of Belkiss,
The Queen of Sheba, to Solomon, depicting in a avant-guard and violent style the
psychological tension and recreating very accurately the tenth century BC Israel. He also
wrote King Galaor and Polycrates' Ring, being one the most prolific Symbolist
theoriticians.[19]

Lugné-Poe (1869–1940) was an actor, director, and theatre producer of the late nineteenth
century. Lugné-Poe "sought to create a unified nonrealistic theatre of poetry and dreams
through atmospheric staging and stylized acting".[20] Upon learning about symbolist theatre,
he never wanted to practice any other form. After beginning as an actor in the Théâtre Libre
and Théâtre d'Art, Lugné-Poe grasped on to the symbolist movement and founded the
Théâtre de l'Œuvre where he was manager from 1892 until 1929. Some of his greatest
successes include opening his own symbolist theatre, producing the first staging of Alfred
Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), and introducing French theatregoers to playwrights such as Ibsen
and Strindberg.[20]

The later works of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov have been identified as being
much influenced by symbolist pessimism. Both Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod
Meyerhold experimented with symbolist modes of staging in their theatrical endeavors.

Drama by symbolist authors formed an important part of the repertoire of the Théâtre de
l'Œuvre and the Théâtre d'Art.

Effect
Black night.
White snow.
The wind, the wind!
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It will not let you go. The wind, the wind!
Through God's whole world it blows

The wind is weaving

The white snow.
Brother ice peeps from below
Stumbling and tumbling
Folk slip and fall.
God pity all!

From "The Twelve" (1918)

Trans. Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky [21]

Night, street and streetlight, drug store,

The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There's no way out.

You'll die – and start all over, live twice,

Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal's rippled icy surface,
The drug store, the street, and streetlight.

"Night, street and streetlight, drugstore..." (1912)

Trans. by Alex Cigale

Among English-speaking artists, the closest counterpart to symbolism was aestheticism.

The pre-Raphaelites were contemporaries of the earlier symbolists, and have much in
common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism, (Remy de
Gourmont considered the Imagists were its descendants)[22] and its traces can also be
detected in the work of many modernist poets, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, and W. B. Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in
Hispanic literature. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire have strong affinities with
symbolism. Early Portuguese Modernism was heavily influenced by Symbolist poets,
especially Camilo Pessanha; Fernando Pessoa had many affinities to Symbolism, such as
mysticism, musical versification, subjectivism and transcendatilism.

Edmund Wilson's 1931 study Axel's Castle focuses on the continuity with symbolism and
several important writers of the early twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on
Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Wilson
concluded that the symbolists represented a dreaming retreat into

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 things that are dying–the whole belle-lettristic tradition of Renaissance culture perhaps,
compelled to specialize more and more, more and more driven in on itself, as industrialism
and democratic education have come to press it closer and closer. [23]

After the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism had a major effect on Russian poetry
even as it became less popular in France. Russian symbolism, steeped in the Eastern
Orthodoxy and the religious doctrines of Vladimir Solovyov, had little in common with the
French style of the same name. It began the careers of several major poets such as
Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Bely's novel Petersburg (1912) is
considered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.

In Romania, symbolists directly influenced by French poetry first gained influence during
the 1880s, when Alexandru Macedonski reunited a group of young poets associated with
his magazine Literatorul. Polemicizing with the established Junimea and overshadowed by
the influence of Mihai Eminescu, Romanian symbolism was recovered as an inspiration
during and after the 1910s, when it was exampled by the works of Tudor Arghezi, Ion
Minulescu, George Bacovia, Mateiu Caragiale, Tristan Tzara and Tudor Vianu, and praised
by the modernist magazine Sburătorul.

The symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism and surrealism in

painting, two movements which descend directly from symbolism proper. The harlequins,
paupers, and clowns of Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" show the influence of symbolism,
and especially of Puvis de Chavannes. In Belgium, symbolism became so popular that it
came to be thought of as a national style: the static strangeness of painters like René
Magritte can be considered as a direct continuation of symbolism. The work of some
symbolist visual artists, such as Jan Toorop, directly affected the curvilinear forms of art
nouveau.

Many early motion pictures also employ symbolist visual imagery and themes in their
staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German expressionism owe a great deal to
symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the cinema of D. W. Griffith, and the
silent film "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara, both show the continuing influence of
symbolism, as do the Babylonian scenes from Griffith's Intolerance. Symbolist imagery
lived on longest in horror film: as late as 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr showed the
obvious influence of symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble tableau vivant re-
creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch.[24]

Symbolists

Precursors

Authors
(listed by year of birth)

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 French German Georgian

French Uruguayan Stefan George (1868-1933) Others

Comte de Lautréamont (1846–70) Portuguese

Jules Laforgue (1860–87)

Belgian

Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) Russian

Georges Rodenbach (1855–98)
Albert Giraud (1860–1929) Serbian
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949)
Léon Frédéric (1865–1940) Armenian
Albert Mockel (1866–1945)

Influence in English literature

English language authors who influenced or were influenced by symbolism include:

Symbolist visual artists

See also: Category:Symbolist painters and Category:Symbolist sculptors

Composers affected by symbolist ideas

Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876–1909) Polish

Alexander Scriabin (1872–1912) Russian
Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) French
Cyril Scott (1879–1970) English
Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) Polish
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911) Lithuanian

Gallery
Gustav Klimt, Allegory of Skulptur, 1889

Jan Toorop, The Three Brides, 1893

Fernand Khnopff, Incense, 1898

Mikhail Vrubel, The Swan Princess, 1900

Franz von Stuck, Susanna und die beiden Alten, 1913

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See also
Visionary art

References
1. ^ Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. Random House,
1967, ch. 2.
2. ^ Balakian, see above; see also Houston, introduction.
3. ^ L'Album zutique
4. ^ Jean Moreas, Le Manifeste du Symbolisme, Le Figaro, 1886
5. ^ Conway Morris, Roderick The Elusive Symbolist movement article – International
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 Herald Tribune, March 17, 2007.
6. ^ Untermeyer, Louis, Preface to Modern American Poetry Harcourt Brace & Co New
York 1950
7. ^ Pratt, William. The Imagist Poem, Modern Poetry in Miniature (Story Line Press,
1963, expanded 2001). ISBN 1-58654-009-2
8. ^ Olds, Marshal C. "Literary Symbolism", originally published (as Chapter 14) in A
Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin
J. H. Dettmar. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pages 155–162.
9. ^ Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes maudits
10. ^ Charles Baudelaire, Bénédiction
11. ^ a b Delvaille, Bernard, La poésie symboliste: anthologie, introduction. ISBN 2-221-
50161-6
12. ^ Luxure, fruit de mort à l'arbre de la vie... , Albert Samain, "Luxure", in the
publication Au jardin de l'infante (1889)
13. ^ Stéphane Mallarmé, Les fenêtres
14. ^ David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian orientalism: Asia in the Russian
mind from Peter the Great to the emigration, New Haven: Yale UP, 2010, p. 211
(online).
15. ^ Olds, see above, p. 160.
16. ^ Langueur, from Jadis et Naguère, 1884
17. ^ Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette (1885)
Les Déliquescences – poèmes décadents d'Adoré Floupette, avec sa vie par Marius
Tapora by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire (in French)
18. ^ Alan Hollinghurst, "Bruges of sighs" (The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2005, accessed 26 Apr
2009
19. ^ SARAIVA, LOPES, António José, Óscar (2017). História da Literatura Portuguesa
(17th ed.). Lisboa: Porto Editora. ISBN 978-972-0-30170-3.
20. ^ a b "Symbolist Movement". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 3 April 2012.
21. ^ Fragment from "The Twelve" re-printed in The Slavonic and East European Review
Vol. 8, No. 22 (Jun., 1929), pp. 188–198
22. ^ de Gourmont, Remy. La France (1915)
23. ^ Quoted in Brooker, Joseph (2004). Joyce's Critics: Transitions in Reading and
Culture. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press. p. 73. ISBN 0299196046.
24. ^ Jullian, Philippe, The Symbolists. (Dutton, 1977) ISBN 0-7148-1739-2

Further reading
Anna Balakian, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. New York: Random
House, 1967.
Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context. London: Routledge, 2011.
Bernard Delvaille, La poésie symboliste: anthologie. Paris: Seghers, 1971. ISBN 2-
221-50161-6.
John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin Houston, French Symbolist Poetry: An
Anthology. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1980. ISBN 0-253-20250-7.
Philippe Jullian, The Symbolists. Oxford: Phaidon; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973.
ISBN 0-7148-1739-2.
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 Andrew George Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885–1895. Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1950, 1968.
The Oxford Companion to French Literature, Sir Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine
(eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. ISBN 0-19-866104-5
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. ISBN 0-
19-281061-8.
Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. (A
Dutton Paperback), 1958.
Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931 (online version). ISBN 978-1-59853-013-1
(Library of America).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Symbolist paintings.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Symbolism (arts)

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