Symbolism

Late 19th-century movement in French poetry, which inspired a similar trend in French painting. The Symbolist poets used words for their symbolic rather than concrete meaning. Leading exponents were Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud.

The poetry and criticism of Charles Baudelaire provided much of the inspiration for the Symbolists poets. On 18 September 1886 Jean Moréas published a Symbolist manifesto in the Paris journal Le Figaro, in which he claimed that it was the function of art ‘to clothe the idea in sensuous form’; a concern with sensuous beauty of form, particularly the musical quality of verse, as well the use of ideal, mythological, or occult imagery, are typical of much Symbolist poetry. The writers were thus reacting against the realistic and naturalistic modes of expression current at the time.

The Symbolist movement as a whole embraced a variety of different art forms, and there was considerable cross-fertilization between poetry, art, and music. Symbolism also found literary expression in the drama of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Maurice Maeterlinck, and the novels of J K Huysmans and Eduoard Dujardin. Poets who have been influenced by the Symbolists include Jules Laforgue, Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, Ezra Pound, T S Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W B Yeats, Stefan George, and Rainer Maria Rilke.