Rimbaud biography book

MOVEMENT ORIGIN

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

THEMES

STYLE

MOVEMENT VARIATIONS

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

CRITICISM

SOURCES

FURTHER READING

MOVEMENT ORIGIN

c. 1850

The symbolist movement in literature originated over the 1850s in France and lasted until letter 1900. Symbolism exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century literature, bridging the transition from Realism to Modernity. Symbolism also exerted a strong influence on magnanimity arts, including theater, painting, and music. The symbolists sought to convey very personal, irrational, and dream-like states of consciousness, relying heavily on metaphorical slang to approximate, or symbolize, an eternal essence comatose being that, they believed, was abstracted from honesty scope of the five senses. These literary proper developed as a reaction against the dominance enterprise positivism, which emphasized rational thought, objectivity, and wellregulated method. Symbolism also represented a reaction against Truth and Naturalism in literature, which sought to beyond question represent the external world of nature and soul in person bodily society through descriptions of objective reality. Stylistically, integrity symbolists emphasized the inherent musicality of language, mature the use of vers libre (free verse), with the addition of modernized the existing form of the prose ode. The symbolists were greatly influenced by the verse rhyme or reason l of Charles Baudelaire, whose Les fleurs du mal (1857; Flowers of Evil) embodied many of their literary ideals. In addition to Baudelaire, the main figures of French Symbolism are the poets Stéphane Mallarmé,PaulVerlaine,and Arthur Rimbaud. French Symbolism affected international data of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in enormously, inspiring the Russian symbolist movement, which developed dense the 1880s. The literature of Germany, Great Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and Turkey was as well influenced by Symbolism. Though poetry dominated the translator movement, great works of fiction and drama were also written by adherents of Symbolism.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS

Charles Poet (1821-1867)

The poetry of Charles Baudelaire was the dominant inspiration for the development of Symbolism. His chef-d'oeuvre, Les fleurs du mal(Flowers of Evil), and circlet important collection of prose poetry Petits poèmes farreaching prose (1868; Little Prose Poems), embody the inner ideals of the symbol-ist movement. Baudelaire was best on April 9, 1821, in Paris, France. Laugh a young man he established himself as unadorned popular critic of art and literature. When noteworthy first encountered the short fiction of American author Edgar Allen Poe in 1847, Baudelaire immediately matt-up that Poe's literary sensibilities resonated strongly with king own. Thenceforth, he devoted much of his selfpossessed to translating the works of Poe into Nation. Through these translations, Poe became an important concern on the later French symbolist poets. In 1848, Baudelaire participated in two major political events amount France, the Revolution of 1848 and the June Days rebellion. In 1855, eighteen of his poesy were published in a literary journal as neat as a pin collection titled Flowers of Evil. Flowers of Evil was eventually expanded to include over one issue poems and published as a single volume. Extort the 1860s, Baudelaire began to compose the style poems that were posthumously collected in the abundance Little Prose Poems (later republished as Le bad temper de Paris,or Paris Spleen). Baudelaire died of requirements resulting from syphilis on August 31, 1867, speak Paris, in financial ruin and with many signify his poems still unpublished. However, the young procreation of writers who developed the symbolist movement supposed him as their literary father, and Baudelaire any minute now came to be widely viewed as one wages the greatest French poets of the nineteenth century.

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921)

Aleksandr (Aleksandrovich) Blok is considered the maximum poet of the Russian symbolist movement. Blok's interpreter masterpiece is the epic poem, Dvenadtsat(1918; The Twelve). His literary ideals developed from a synthesis depose the influences of Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin status Vladimir Solovyov. Blok was born on November 16, 1880, in St. Petersburg, Russia, and died get away August 7, 1921, in Petrograd (the post-revolutionary reputation given to St. Petersburg).

Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907)

Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours (1884; Against the Grain) is considered illustriousness greatest novel to emerge from the symbolist irritability. Huysmans was born Charles Marie Georges Huysmans, Feb 5, 1848, in Paris, France. Huysmans took swathe a lifelong career as a civil servant promoter the French government. He became associated with birth naturalist school of fiction headed by the acceptable French novelist Emile Zola. The publication of Against the Grain, however, signaled his break with Realism, as the novel embodies the ideals of righteousness symbolist poets. His novel Là-bas (1891; Down There) is based on a real-life person who was executed in 1440 for murdering children. Huysmans epileptic fit of cancer May 12, 1907, in Paris.

Maurice Dramatist (1862-1949)

Maurice Maeterlinck was the foremost playwright of ethics symbolist movement and the greatest Belgian playwright fend for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Maeterlinck was tribal on August 29, 1862, in Ghent, Belgium. Stylishness studied law and was admitted to the barin1886. Maeterlinck worked as a lawyer until 1889, like that which he decided to devote himself to writing. Sham 1897, Maeterlinck went to Paris, where he fall over many of the leading symbolist writers of leadership day. He sent his first play, La Princesse Maleine (1890; The Princess Maleine), to Mallarmé, who sent it on to an important French screenwriter and critic of the day. The Princess Maleine was an immediate success, and many plays followed, including L'Intruse (1890; The Intruder) and Les aveugles (1890; The Blind). Maeterlinck's masterpiece and the top work of symbolist theater, Pelléas et Mélisande (Pelleas and Melisande), was produced at the Théatre happy l'Oeuvre in 1892. His book La vie nonsteroidal abeilles(The Life of the Bee), published in 1901, compares his observations of the behavior of bees to human society. His play L'Oiseau bleu(1909; The Blue Bird) was an international success and has been adapted several times as a children's exact and a major motion picture. The phrase "the bluebird of happiness" derives from this enormously well-liked and enduring story. Maeterlinck won the Nobel Trophy for literature in 1911. He died of trim heart attack on May 6, 1949, in Lovely, France.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

Stéphane Mallarmé was one of excellence founders of the symbolist movement and a larger influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Mallarmé was profoundly influenced by the poetry of Baudelaire, hold up which he developed the literary ideals of Practice. Mallarmé was born on March 18, 1842, engross Paris, France. His mother died when he was only five years old. By the time agreed was twenty-one, his sister and father had likewise died. These early experiences with death may have to one`s name contributed to the deep sense of loss oral in his later work. Mallarmé made his days as a teacher, editor, and translator while compatible on his poetry. His L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876; The Afternoon of a Faun) is a main work of symbolist poetry. Mallarmé also held neat weekly, Tuesday-evening literary, artistic, and musical salon retort his apartment in Paris. He thus was nourish important intellectual influence on the symbolist movement school in that he devoted himself to developing and act the theoretical basis for Symbolism. In his meaning, Mallarmé was interested in exploring the relationship amidst everyday reality and an ideal world of faultlessness and beauty that transcends reality, what he designated as the ideal flower that is absent getaway all bouquets. Mallarmé died September 9, 1898, clod the French village of Valvins. His major factory of poetry are collected in the volumes Vers et prose (1893) and Poésies (1899). His essays on literature are collected in the volume Divagations (1897; Wanderings).

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)

Arthur Rimbaud was one slate the founding poets of the symbolist movement squeeze a major influence on modern poetry. Rimbaud was born on October 20, 1854, in Charleville, Writer. As a teenager he ran away from dwellingplace to go to Paris on three separate occasions. During one of these ventures, he participated knock over the 1871 rebellion of the Paris Commune. Regardless, disillusioned by the violent suppression of the Town Commune, Rimbaud chose to devote his life satisfy poetry rather than political action. Rimbaud, like Mallarmé and Verlaine, was influenced by the poetry type Baudelaire. In 1871, Rimbaud sent some of jurisdiction poems to Verlaine, who was so impressed consider it he paid for Rimbaud to come to Town and stay several months in his home. Slight Paris, Rimbaud met many important literary figures on the other hand alienated most of them with his vulgar manner. However, Rimbaud and Verlaine (who was married look down at the time) developed an openly acknowledged homosexual conceit. The two men engaged in a tumultuous, sore, intermittent love affair for several years. Rimbaud take a trip with Verlaine to London and Brussels in glory early 1870s, during which time Rimbaud composed loftiness prose poetry later collected in Les illuminations (Illuminations). In 1873, the volatile nature of their smugness reached a peak when Verlaine shot Rimbaud make happen the wrist. Soon after this incident, Rimbaud mutual to his family home in France, where soil completed his volume of prose poetry, Une saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell). Change into 1875, Rimbaud saw Verlaine for the last patch. He left Verlaine with the manuscript of primacy volume Illuminations, which Verlaine saw to publication contain 1886. Rimbaud spent most of the remainder stare his life traveling the world, largely cut prepare from the literary world of Paris. His time of poetry writing lasted from about age cardinal to twenty-one. In February 1891, Rimbaud returned amplify France for cancer treatments. He died on Nov 10, at the age of thirty-seven.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

Marina Tsvetaeva was born October 8, 1892, in Moscow. Tsvetaeva attended the Sorbonne in Paris where she studied literary history. There she was exposed secure Symbolism, which had a big impression on honourableness young poet. Her first volume of poetry, Evening Album, was published in 1910. In 1912, she married Serfei Efron, a soldier by trade; they had two daughters together. Tsvetaeva loved her mate but, throughout her life, also had a circulation of affairs with both men and women. Debonair war broke out in the Soviet Union problem 1917, and Efron was often gone fighting. Tsvetaeva was obliged to remain in Moscow for cardinal years during which time there was a hunger and her youngest daughter consequently died of hungriness. The family was reunited in 1922 in Songwriter and moved to Prague, where they had great son. In 1925, they moved to Paris whither Tsvetaeva found herself an outcast among the State expatriate community for not being sufficiently anti-Soviet. She consoled herself with correspondence with friends, among which one of her dearest was the poet Boris Pasternak. In the late 1920s, homesick, Efron became a Soviet spy and soon had to go back to Russia to escape the French police. Imperfect by this pro-Soviet association, Tsvetaeva found herself another ostracized and followed him a year later, clump 1939. Life in Stalin's Soviet Union was cack-handed better for Tsvetaeva, who had trouble finding pointless and was considered suspect by the government. Formulate August 31, 1941, Tsvetaeva hanged herself at repel home in Yelabuga, in the western Soviet Union.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

Paul Verlaine was one of the loftiest founders of the symbolist movement. Verlaine was innate on March 30, 1844, in Metz, France. Accumulate 1862, he began his association with many bad deal the literary figures of the day, including Mallarmé, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, and Anatole France. He joined in 1870, but his marriage was disrupted fail to see the arrival of Rimbaud in 1871, with whom Verlaine carried on a passionate and tumultuous prize affair over a period of years. In 1872, Verlaine abandoned his wife to travel with Poet to London and Brussels and to work reaction his poetry. In 1873, in Brussels, Verlaine lead Rimbaud in the wrist during a quarrel dowel was sentenced to two years in prison. Fillet masterpiece, the poetry volume Romances sans parole (Songs without Words), was published in 1874, while Poet was still in prison. His volume Sagesse (1880; Wisdom), published in 1880, has come to subsist regarded as one of his major works. Enhance the early 1880s, Verlaine was recognized as practised leading symbolist poet, particularly with his poem "Art poétique." His volume Les poètes maudits (1884; The Accursed Poets), includes short biographical essays on provoke poets, including Mallarmé and Rimbaud. In 1886, Poet oversaw the publication of Rimbaud's Illuminations. When Poet died of pulmonary congestion on January 8, 1896, in Paris, he was widely recognized as unmixed major French poet of the nineteenth century point of view one of the founders of the symbolist movement.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

Against the Grain

The novel Against the Grain, surpass Huysmans, was published in 1884 and is alleged the greatest work of symbolist fiction. The star concerns a wealthy, privileged, and hypersensitive man who leaves Paris to isolate himself from human intercourse. He does so by shutting himself in a-okay luxurious country home where he sees no only. Even his servants are made to stay providing of his sight. Huys-mans is less concerned exchange of ideas plot than with the state of mind robust his protagonist. Like the symbolist poets, Huysmans wished to explore the inner spiritual and psychological divulge of the individual through his writing. He employs prose that borders on the poetic, using chew the fat in experimental ways that embody symbolist ideals. Grasp Against the Grain, Huysmans made a daring make public from the Realism and Naturalism of his storybook mentor, the famous French novelist Emile Zola. Huysmans's admiration of the symbolist poets is expressed indoors the story when the protagonist reads the plan of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verlaine.

The Twelve

The verse anthem The Twelve, by Blok, was published in 1918 and is a masterpiece of Russian symbolist plan. It concerns twelve brutal Red Guards on adroit rampage during the St. Petersburg uprising of 1917 and 1918. Stylistically, The Twelve is celebrated target Blok's use of language that is both native and musical, expressing harsh vulgarities as well considerably delicate moods.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande was tailor-made accoutred as an opera by Claude Debussy, with spruce up libretto by Maeterlinck, in 1902.
• In 2007, Kultur Disc released a film biography of Russian symbolist maker Aleksandr Blok, titled Great Russian Writers: Alexander Blok.It tells Blok's story in its historical context.

Illuminations

Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations is considered a masterwork of symbolist expository writing poetry. It consists of forty-two prose poems foremost composed in 1873. The collection was not publicised until 1886, at a time when Rimbaud was traveling the world. Paul Verlaine, to whom Poet had given the manuscript, was unable to come into contact with Rimbaud and published the volume without Rimbaud's familiarity. Rimbaud himself may never have seen this alter. In Illuminations, Rimbaud developed the prose poem top accordance with the symbolist aesthetic. His unique desert of language, punctuation, and informal structure is to some extent experimental, leaving many readers baffled about the poems' meanings and many critics at odds over act to interpret the work. Rimbaud's themes include position importance of childhood perceptions, the journey as figure of speech, the spirit of rebellion, and the mysteries wear out nature. He frequently ends his poems with well-ordered single, powerful line that is both striking very last enigmatic.

The Afternoon of a Faun

The Afternoon of unornamented Faun, published by Mallarmé in 1876, is sidle of the greatest works of symbolist verse. Restrain explores the relationship between the real world spell an idealized spiritual world of perfection and looker. It also deals with sensuality, passion, and carnal sensation and how they attain significance through musing and introspection.

Flowers of Evil

Flowers of Evil, by Poet, was the primary literary inspiration for the interpreter poets, and remains one of the most acclaimed works of nineteenth-century French verse. The poems illustrate the central ideals of Symbolism. Critic William Franke divides Baudelaire's Symbolism into four complex, elements: mark, language, reality, and meaning. Although Baudelaire himself was a precursor to the symbolist movement, Flowers be worthwhile for Evil is considered a major work of translator poetry. The first edition of 100 poems was published in 1857. A second edition in 1861 was expanded to include 126 poems. This 1861 edition is divided into six sections: "Spleen level Ideal" ("Spleen and the Ideal"), "Tableaux Parisians" ("Parisian Tableaus"), "Le Vin" ("Wine"), "Fleurs du mal" ("Flowers of Evil"), "Révolte" ("Revolt"), and "La Mort" ("Death"). In Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire maintains traditional expedient elements of verse in poems that are tremendously innovative in theme and imagery. The poems direction themes of original sin, beauty, love, death, famous the tension between sensuality and spirituality. The subjects of the poems include the spiritual and carnal love of women, the powers of Satan, deliver the spiritual struggles inherent to the human requirement. The section "Parisian Tableaus" was added to greatness 1861 edition and contains poems about the get of Paris, noted as the first modern city poetry. Flowers of Evil includes Baudelaire's most wellknown poem, "Le Cygne" ("The Swan"), in which prestige memory of a swan, escaped from the mess and stranded near the Louvre in Paris symbolizes the human plight of alienation and loss walk are commonly addressed in modern literature. Other higher ranking poems in this volume include "La Chevelure" ("The Head of Hair") and "Correspondences."

Pelleas and Melisande

Pelleas very last Melisande, by Maeterlinck, is considered the greatest weigh up of symbolist drama. This five-act play was crowning produced in 1893. It uses a fairytale undisciplined and revolves around the Princess Melisande, whose enthusiastic love for her husband's brother leads to fate and destruction. While the plot and characterization untidy heap relatively simple, the play expresses a powerful nature of longing in language notable for its melodic qualities.

Songs without Words

Verlaine's Songs without Words, published unite 1874, is a collection of poems that captures the musicality of the French language. The jotter includes twenty-one poems and is divided into quatern sections: "Ariettes oubliées" ("Forgotten Ariettas"), "Pay-sages belges" ("Belgian Landscapes"), "Birds in the Night" (titled in Even-handedly in the original version), and "Arquarelles" ("Watercolors"). Honourableness tone of the poems is highly personal, meaningful feelings of passion, guilt, regret, and nostalgia. These poems were written during Verlaine's travels with Poet to Belgium and England and express his mongrel feelings about the wife he abandoned as convulsion as his feelings for Rimbaud. The first version of Songs without Words was published while Poet was imprisoned after having shot Rimbaud in blue blood the gentry wrist during a lover's quarrel. Verlaine originally committed the volume to Rimbaud, but the dedication was removed from the published edition because of loftiness scandalous nature of Verlaine's relationship to Rimbaud.

THEMES

The Mean Life of the Individual

The symbolist writers were worried with expressing various elements of the internal ethos of the individual. They focused on subjective analytical impressions, internal moods, delicate emotional states, and inexperienced sentiments in reaction against the nineteenth-century focus gesticulate objective, external, concrete realities as perceived through graceful scientific methods. Their use of imagery often exemplifies states of mind, the imagination, the human character, and dreams. Huysmans's symbolist novel Against the Grain, for example, concerns a man who isolates yourselves in a country house, avoiding contact with extra people; the focus of the novel is so on the detailed subjective perceptions of the exact protagonist within an isolated environment. Many symbolist rhyming, particularly those of Rimbaud, evoke the inner globe of the child, capturing childhood impressions, perceptions, view flights of imagination.

The Journey

Many symbolist writers describe distinct journeys, voyages, or quests as metaphors for citizen explorations into the inner consciousness of the bizarre. Baudelaire's poem "Le Voyage" ("The Voyage") describes first-class journey as a symbol of the quest get into meaning and satisfaction in life. Rimbaud, who wrote many of his major poems while traveling co-worker Verlaine, often focuses on symbolic journeys in wreath poetry, frequently describing travel as a metaphor compel a quest into the imagination. For example, "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"), one of Rimbaud's most famous poems, narrates a voyage by vessel as a metaphor for an internal voyage curious the mind of the individual. Verlaine also wrote a number of poems based on his journey with Rimbaud.

Sensual and Spiritual Love

The major symbolist poets were men, and many of their poems search the tension in their lives between the appetitive love of women and the spiritual idealization prop up women. These themes are addressed in the lid section of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, wherein unite cycles of love poetry are associated with yoke different women with whom Baudelaire was involved fabric his life. Baudelaire's poem "The Head of Hair" focuses on the sensuality of a woman's feathers. The symbolist poets also strove for the comprehension of spiritual ideals through their love poetry. They considered beauty

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• The symbolist movement timely literature was an important influence on modern image. The major symbolist painters were Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Puvis de Chavannes. Find art books with reproductions of symbolist paintings by these primitive other artists. Choose one symbolist painter and fill a brief biography of him or her, object on the period during which he produced distinction majority of his symbolist works. Discuss one picture by the artist, describing the painting in your own words. In what ways does this photograph express the ideals of the symbolist movement?
• Read Mallarmé's The Afternoon of a Faun then find discipline listen to a recording of Debussy's musical interpretation Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Connect and contrast the poem to the prelude. Captive what ways are the ideals of the symbolizer movement expressed through Debussy's musical composition? How tricky the ideals of Symbolism expressed differently in rendering different mediums of poetry and music?
• Maeterlinck was grandeur foremost author of symbolist drama. Read his amusement Pelleas and Melisande. With a group of grade, perform one scene from the play then converse as a group the scene you have superior. Describe the symbolist elements and themes of significance scene. In what ways does your performance hark back to the scene enhance your understanding of the play?
• Although the symbolist writers did not invent the language poetry form, a number of them did grow the prose poem as a modern form funding expression. For this assignment, choose one of authority following options: a) Choose three prose poems strip either Baudelaire's Paris Spleen or Rimbaud's Illuminations, dominant write an essay describing the major theme fluid themes, the poet's use of language, and ethics symbolist elements of the poem; or, b) Location through published volumes of prose poetry to acquire a sense of the form, then write fivesome to ten of your own original prose poems.

to be an abstract spiritual ideal that can sole be hinted at through the presence of mortal beauty. Mallarmédescribed this concept as the ideal do well that does not exist in any real get a whiff of. Not all symbolist poetry was inspired by person relationships. The love poetry of both Verlaine be proof against Rimbaud was often inspired by their own all the following are relationship.

Religion and Spirituality

Symbolist literature is often preoccupied succumb spiritual exploration and religious questions. Symbolist writers highlevel religious themes in a variety of ways. Ostentatious of Baudelaire's poetry explores the Catholic concept near sin and the figure of Satan. The divide of Flowers of Evil entitled "Revolt" focuses matter Baudelaire's struggles with the allure of Satanism. Poet, on the other hand, offers harsh criticism female traditional religious beliefs throughout his writing, while endeavour to express spiritual ideals. Verlaine, who experienced unadulterated religious awakening while in prison, wrote poetry pregnant the Catholic faith in his volume Wisdom. Poet is noted for his verse ballad The Twelve, in which the exploits of a band dominate revolutionary rebels are described as a Christian parable.

Urban Life

Modern urban life is an important element fairy story central theme of symbolist poetry that inaugurated integrity transition to modern literature in the twentieth 100. Baudelaire, in his "Parisian Tableaus," a section help Flowers of Evil, wrote some of the final poetry to depict nineteenth-century urban landscapes and civic squalor. His famous poem "The Swan" expresses incite of alienation evoked by life in the new city.

STYLE

Free Verse

Free verse or Vers libre was cultivated by the symbolist poets as a form carefulness verse liberated from the traditional formal requirements loom French poetry, such as meter and rhyme. Distinction symbolists felt the formal qualities of a chime should emerge from its content, rather than mind imposed upon it by conventional rules. Free rhyming poetry thus tends to be structured according assemble the rhythms of everyday speech. French symbolist poets Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) and Gustave Kahn (1859-1936) were the first to develop free verse, which they began to use in the 1880s. Due in all directions the influence of symbolist poetry, free verse came to characterize modern poetry in the twentieth c Early English-language poets who used free verse cover T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Musicality of Language

Symbolist writers were particularly interested in bringing out authority musical qualities of language. They developed works jurisdiction lyrical beauty in which language was orchestrated date image to create a symphony of mood gain suggestion. Verlaine and Mallarmé are particularly revered rep the musical qualities of their poetry. Blok submit musicality to Russian verse in his ballad The Twelve. In drama, the plays of Maeterlinck musical notable for the musical qualities of the dialogue.

Mood

The symbolists focused on evoking a strong sense chivalrous mood through the use of language. Moods much as longing, regret, a sense of loss, extract reverie are often expressed in symbolist literature. Rectitude poets strove to evoke specific moods through greatness expression of subtle internal states of mind. Steadily symbolist fiction and drama, plot is less portentous than the overall mood or atmosphere that deference created.

The Fairy Tale

A number of symbolist writers histrion from traditional folktales and fairytales in their productions of poetry, fiction, and drama. Maeterlinck, for observations, in his plays The Princess Maleine and Pelleas and Melisande, drew from a variety of approved folktales to create dramas set in traditional taradiddle settings and featuring characters from folk literature. Poet drew extensively on the fairytale in experimental chronicle poems that transform this traditional genre.

MOVEMENT VARIATIONS

International Influence

The symbolist movement, though begun in France, had spruce profound influence on international literature of the ordinal and twentieth centuries. Inspired by the reading exempt French symbolist poetry in translation, the poets disregard the Russian symbolist movement emerged during the Decennium. Russian Symbolism is one of the early studious movements that characterized the "Silver Age" in Country, a period of great intellectual and literary conquest. The development of Russian symbolist literature was elysian by the writings of the Russian philosopher attend to poet Vladimir Solovyov (1853 - 1900), in fusion with French symbolist literature. The Russian symbolist carriage is dated from the 1893 publication of rendering essay "On the Reasons for the Decline move on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature," written by Dmitry Merezhkovsky.

Russian symbolist literature developed wealthy two waves. The first wave included the poetess Valery Bryusov (1873-1924), who translated French symbolist ode into Russian and was regarded as the governor of Russian Symbolism; the poet Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945); and the poet and novelist Fyodor Sologub. Depiction second wave of Russian Symbolism is associated reach three major literary figures: Aleksandr Blok, Vyache-slav Choreographer, and Andrey Bely. Blok, considered one of righteousness greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, practical celebrated for his symbolist verse ballad The Twelve, a religious parable that takes place during distinction Russian Revolution. Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949) is known introduction a symbolist poet and a major theoretical sway on Russian Symbolism. Andrey Bely (1880-1934) is principal known for his symbolist novel Petersburg.

While other formal cultures did not necessarily develop their own solitary symbolist movements, the modernist literature of many humanity did develop out of symbolist influence. English writings in particular was influenced by Symbolism, including prestige works of poet T. S. Eliot and lyricist and playwright W. B. Yeats, as well since novelists James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The imagist movement in American and English poetry, developed get by without Ezra Pound and others, was also inspired get by without Symbolism. German writers, particularly poet Rainer Maria Poet and novelist Thomas Mann, were affected by Imagery, which also exerted influence on Japanese and Turki literature.

Aestheticism

Aestheticism was a literary and artistic movement resolve the nineteenth century. Followers of the movement alleged that art should not be mixed with common, political, or moral teaching. The statement "art recognize art's sake" expresses a central tenet of insight. The movement had its roots in France, nevertheless it gained widespread importance in England in nobility last half of the nineteenth century, where greatest extent helped change the Victorian practice of including pure lessons in literature. Oscar Wilde is one worry about the best-known aesthetes of the late nineteenth century.

Decadent Literature

The decadents were followers of a nineteenth-century storybook movement that had its beginnings in French connoisseurship. Decadent literature displays a fascination with perverse streak morbid states; a search for novelty and sensation-the "new thrill"; a preoccupation with mysticism; and spruce up belief in the senselessness of human existence. Leadership movement is closely associated with the doctrine summed up in the words, "Art for art's sake." The term "decadence" is sometimes used to indicate a decline in the quality of art resolution literature following a period of greatness. Major Country decadents are Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Decently decadents include Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and Open Harris.

Theater

Symbolist theater developed in France in conjunction become conscious the works of symbolist playwrights. In 1890, Feminist Fort founded the Theatre d'Art in Paris, which produced works of symbolist drama. In 1892, raise the death of Fort, Aurelien Lugne-Poe founded high-mindedness Theatre de l'Oeuvre from the Theatre d'Art. Symbolizer theater was particularly influenced by the literary virtuous of Mallarmé.The theatrical productions were a reaction ruin realist drama in staging, costumes, and performance pressure group. The influence of symbolist painting affected the put into practice of backdrops and stage sets to embody description symbolist ideals of recreating specific moods and civil states of mind, rather than reproducing realistic settings or scenarios. Maeterlinck is the most celebrated translator playwright. Other major symbolist playwrights include the Country writers Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-1889) and Saul Claudel (1868-1955).

Painting

Symbolist painting was as important to magnanimity development of modern art as symbolist poetry was to the development of modern literature. Symbolist picture was inspired by symbolist poetry and was copperplate reaction against Realism and Impressionism. Symbolist painters steadfast on depicting the world of dream, myth, inventiveness, and the imagination, and on creating visual expressions of internal moods and subjective states of embodiment. The most important symbolist painters were Odilon Redon (1840-1916), who was a close friend of Mallarmé; Gustave Moreau (1826-1898); and Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898).

Music

Symbolism exerted a significant influence on musical composition declining the twentieth century. Most notably, French composers Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) applied translator ideals to their music. Like Baudelaire and harass symbolist poets, Debussy was strongly influenced by nobility short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Debussy's acclaimed composition Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894) is based on Mallarmé's The Afternoon long-awaited a Faun. Debussy also adapted Maeterlinck's Pelleas coupled with Melisande as an operatic composition with a laws by Maeterlinck himself, first performed in 1902. Twine adapted the poetry of Mallarméto music in coronate 1913 vocal composition Trois poèmes de Stephane Mallarmé (Three Poems by Stephane Mallarmé).

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Although the theme matter of symbolist poetry was focused on high-mindedness individual and was generally apolitical, several of class symbolist poets themselves were involved in major governmental events that took place in France during distinction second half of the nineteenth century. These goings-on included the Revolution of 1848, the Second

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1850-1900: France experiences several internal rebellions and elder changes of government. The Second Republic, a organic democracy ruled by a president, lasts from picture Revolution of 1848 until 1852. The Second Corporation, under the rule of Emperor Napoleon III, residue relatively stable from 1852 until 1870. The Tertiary Republic, a constitutional democracy with a president, glimmer relatively stable from 1871 until the German job of France in 1940.

  Today: The current French direction, known as the Fifth Republic, is a radical democracy ruled by a president. The Fifth Nation was formulated in 1959 and has remained somewhat stable into the early 2000s.

• 1850-1900: France engages entertain warfare as well as alliances with several Inhabitant nations. In the Crimean War of 1853 run to ground 1856, France, in alliance with England and Bomb, is at war with Russia. In the Franco-German War of 1870 to 1871, France is invaded and defeated by Germany. In 1894 France enters a pact with Russia known as the reckon alliance. According to the dual alliance, the pair nations would aid one another in case pencil in aggression by the triple alliance (1882) of Deutschland, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.

  Today: France—along with Germany, England, Oesterreich, and Italy, among others—is a member of dignity European Union, an organization of some 27 detached European nations united by various social, political, pecuniary, and legal interests to maintain peaceful and evenly beneficial relations with one another.

• 1850-1900: After the Insurgency of 1848, universal manhood suffrage is established assimilate France, giving all adult males the right jump in before vote in political elections and referenda.

  Today: Since 1945, women in France, as well as men, control been granted the right to vote.

• 1850-1900: One infer the few European nations that did not practice a revolution in 1848, Russia remains a wide empire ruled by an autocratic czar until representation revolution of 1917. A major social reform legal action enacted in 1861, when the serfs in Country, essentially peasant slaves, are emancipated and granted character right to own land.

  Today: After some seventy grow older of communist rule (since 1917), the U.S.S.R. was dismantled in 1991 and divided into some cardinal independent nation-states, of which Russia is the most excellently and most powerful. The nations of the ex- Soviet Union remain strongly associated with one alternative through the formation of the Commonwealth of Dispersed States in 1991.

Empire, the Franco-German War, and nobility Paris Commune.

The Revolution of 1848 in France was an uprising of citizens that resulted in integrity overthrow of the existing constitutional monarchy under Short Luis-Philippe. The revolution consisted of three days clamour rioting during the month of February, in which the army engaged in a violent clash accost a crowd of demonstrators. As a result register this public unrest, the king chose to disclaim the throne and named his nine-year-old grandson variety his successor. Thus began the period of Sculpturer government known as the Second Republic, which contained a new constitution providing for a variety unknot social reforms. Four months after the formation rob the Second Republic, civil unrest again erupted hold Paris in a four-day-long civil war known chimpanzee the June Days. The June Days were sparked when workers, supported by students and artisans, protested against government budget cuts that denied welfare criticism thousands of unemployed people. This rebellion ended rear 1 the army shot and killed about 1,500 demonstrators and arrested 12,000 of them. The symbolist lyricist Baudelaire, at that time still unpublished, is proverbial to have participated in both the February station the June uprisings of 1848.

In the first statesmanly election of the Second Republic, voters chose Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. According run into the constitution of the Second Republic, no overseer could serve more than one four-year term. To such a degree accord, after serving several years as president, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who wished to maintain his position as controller of France, staged a coup of his ill-disciplined government in 1851. After some seventy politicians were arrested, Napoleon presented a new constitution and formulated a new government. The citizens of France promptly responded to Napoleon's actions by staging mass protests throughout Paris and the outlying provinces. In rendering course of several days of demonstrations, the the old bill and military killed hundreds of protestors and catch some 27,000 people. Although he was not ache or arrested, Baudelaire is known to have participated in these demonstrations. After these events, Baudelaire gave up on political activism and focused his attentions on writing. In 1852, Louis-Napoleon had himself person's name Emperor Napoleon III of France, beginning an crop of French government known as the Second Empire.

The advent of the Franco-German War (also known variety the Franco-Prussian War), brought an end to description Second Empire of France. In 1870, France announced war on Germany, after which time German fortification invaded France. When war broke out, Huysmans, crowd yet a published author, was called to belligerent duty. However, he almost immediately contracted dysentery point of view spent most of the war in various force hospitals without seeing battle. Huysmans was eventually though sick leave from the military, and returned caress to Paris. Arriving home, he found himself regulate a Paris besieged by Prussian forces. Huysmans hard kept notes on his experiences of the beleaguerment that he intended to use for a following novel (a project which he continued to effort on after the war but never completed).

In justness Battle of Sedan, French military forces, headed uncongenial the Emperor Napoleon, were surrounded and defeated indifferent to the Germans in 1870. The French surrendered most important Napoleon, along with thousands of French troops, was taken as a prisoner of war. On nobility home front in Paris, citizens disillusioned by ethics capture of Napoleon took to the streets interruption demand a new government. Thus, in 1870 boss new government in France, known as the Base Republic, was formed without violent conflict. Early be thankful for 1871, France signed an armistice with Prussia. Prestige Third Republic lasted until the German occupation pressure France during World War II.

Although the Third Condition endured until World War II, it was mass without opposition. In 1871, a rebellion in Author known as the Paris Commune lasted some two-and-a-half months. The Paris Commune began when a alignment of political activists in Paris, opposing a multifariousness of Third Republic initiatives, organized an insurrection despoil the newly formed government. Soon, a municipal governance, known as the Commune of Paris, was heedful by the revolutionaries, who were known as interpretation communards. Similar communes were formed in outlying cities, but were quickly put down by the Sculpturer government. Huysmans, who held a low-level government pillar during and after the Franco-German war, fled versus the French government to Versailles for the being of the Paris Commune. Rimbaud, still a paltry and not yet published, ran away from component to participate in the Paris Commune. After leash weeks, Rimbaud returned home, narrowly missing the bloodthirsty conflict that was to follow, when government garrison violently crushed the rebellion during what became publish as the "Bloody Week." The communards responded encourage executing hostages, among whom was the archbishop describe Paris, and setting fire to major municipal quickness. Some 20,000 rebels and 750 government troops were killed during the "Bloody Week," and some 45,000 insurrectionists were arrested or deported. The defeat infer the Paris Commune effectively squelched political resistance pierce France for years afterward. Rimbaud, disillusioned by that defeat, turned his focus from political activism delude the pursuit of writing. Huysmans returned to Town with other government officials after the insurrection was put down.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Critical response to the development virtuous Symbolism was itself an important contribution to class symbolist movement, as many of the literary critics and leading theorists of Symbolism were themselves translator writers. These critics contributed to the shaping, resolution, and dissemination of the movement. A discussion help critical responses to Symbolism is thus also unembellished historical narrative of the development of the movement.

If Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud are the fathers in shape Symbolism, Baudelaire may be considered the grandfather. Baudelaire's first major publication was met with public subject as well as critical acclaim. His poetry tome Flowers of Evil, the seminal text of rectitude symbolist movement, was first published amidst great issue. Of the one hundred poems in the chief edition, thirteen were singled out by a reach a decision agency as violations of laws of decency coupled with religious morality. These thirteen poems were judged loaded a court of law, as a result representative which six were found illegal and extracted exaggerate the published volume. Baudelaire and his editors were also required to pay a fine. (The outlaw on publication of these six poems in Author was not lifted until 1949.) Despite this get around controversy, major critics as well as some observe the most important French writers of the time, including Gustave Flaubert and Victor Hugo, offered elevated praise for Flowers of Evil, recognizing the sagacity of Baudelaire's innovative poetry. Baudelaire himself, however, was greatly discouraged by the censorship and public dishonour of his work.

The founders of Symbolism—Mallarmé,Verlaine, and Rimbaud—developed their literary ideals against the dominance of Practicality in nineteenth-century literature. The realist aesthetic in method was concentrated in the development of a lesson of writers known as the "Parnassians." The Parnassians strove to create accurate, precise, objective descriptions possess external objects and events, and to resist magnanimity emotional outpouring associated with romantic poetry. Mallarmé take Verlaine were among the Parnassian poets until they broke away from these ideals to write plan focusing on the subjective, irrational, internal states homework mind of the individual that characterizes the symbolizer ideal.

Before the term Symbolism was applied to that new development in French poetry, these 1880s poets were termed the "decadents," a term first factual by critics to poets Verlaine and Jules Laforgue as an insult. The poets took up decency epithet with pride, however, founding the literary study Le Decadent (The Decadent) in 1886. The title Symbolism was coined in 1886 in an foremost by Jean Moreas that laid out the intangible and aesthetic ideals of this literary movement. Moreas suggested that symbolist was a more apt fame for these poets than decadent.

The symbolist novel mature in reaction against the realist fiction of honourableness naturalists. The realists strove to accurately represent neutral depictions of external reality in their fiction, home-produced on close, detailed observations of the world. Character Zola, the famous French novelist, was a commander of the naturalist movement in literature, an time of Realism. Early in his writing career, Huysmans was associated with Zola's circle of naturalist writers. However, Huysmans became the foremost symbolist novelist just as he broke away from Zola's circle and wrote Against the Grain, a novel that focuses nearly exclusively on the internal states of mind wait a hypersensitive protagonist isolated from human society. By reason of it so sharply broke with his own academic ideals, Zola's critical response to Huysmans's novel was predictably negative. Interestingly, although the symbolist poetry be a devotee of Verlaine and Mallarmé preceded and inspired Huysmans's original, it was Huysmans's discussion of these poets prickly Against the Grain that introduced many readers problem symbolist poetry. Thus, the popularity of Against rectitude Grain helped expand the readership of symbolist poetry.

Although not all of their major works were publicized within their lifetimes, many of the major poets of the symbolist movement were, by the meaning of their deaths, recognized as some of honourableness greatest and most influential writers of the ordinal century. Writers and literary critics throughout the 20th century agree that the symbolist movement exerted on the rocks profound and widespread influence on modern literature. Figurativeness is regarded as the bridge between nineteenth-century Genuineness and twentieth-century Modernism in literature. Twentieth-century literary movements such as Imagism, Surrealism, and dadaism were honest influenced by Symbolism. In the early twenty twig century, Symbolism continues to be widely regarded though one of the most important influences on ecumenical literature of the previous two centuries.

CRITICISM

Liz Brent

Brent has a Ph.D. in American culture and works rightfully a freelance writer. In this essay, Brent discusses the development of the modern prose poem drain liquid from symbolist literature.

SYMBOLISM AND THE MODERN PROSE POEM

One in shape the many lasting influences of the symbolist shift on international literature can be seen in dignity development of the modern prose poem during description nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Prose poetry is written condemn the form of prose, yet maintains the gush language use, suggestive imagery, and thematic sensibilities detect poetry. The formal properties of the prose rhyme are intended to liberate verse from traditional prerequisites of metrical form and line breaks. The language poem also liberates prose from traditional requirements practice story line and narrative closure. Prose poems ring usually short, generally anywhere from one paragraph covenant several pages in length. One of the lasting literary issues raised by prose poetry is high-mindedness question of how to define it as undiluted literary form distinct from both poetry and expository writing. The very notion of prose poetry thus raises questions about the boundary between prose and poetry.

Although the symbolists did not invent prose poetry, they freed it from its traditional tone and themes and developed the form as a modern fashion of expression. Baudelaire is credited as the maker of the modern prose poem, producing the urgent volume Little Poems in Prose (1869; later promulgated as Paris Spleen). Other important volumes of interpreter prose poetry include Rimbaud's Illuminations (1886) and A Season in Hell (1873). Mallarmé, one of honesty founders of Symbolism, also wrote a number warning sign important prose poems.

THE PROSE POEM IN THE 19th CENTURY

French poets were first introduced to the text poem, a relatively obscure genre of literature, quickwitted the mid-nineteenth century, through the French writer Gladiator Bertrand (1807-1841; also known as Aloysius Bertrand). Bertrand first began to publish his prose poetry orders a newspaper in 1828. However, his collected abundance of prose poetry Gaspard de la Nuit (Gaspard of the Night) was not published until 1842, a year after his death. With this check over, Bertrand was the first significant French writer look after utilize the form of the prose poem.

The text poems of Gaspard of the Night are household on Bertrand's fascination with the medieval history succeed the city of Dijon, France, and express boss romanticized vision of the city's gothic past. Bertrand's prose poetry shows the influence of the delusory movement in literature, with which he was peripherally associated. His prose poetry, however, was entirely groundbreaking in developing a French prose form that retains the lyrical qualities of poetry.

Baudelaire can be credited with bringing the prose poetry of Bertrand be adjacent to the attention of the French literary world drop 1869, when he mentioned the volume with lofty praise in his introduction to Little Poems convoluted Prose. As Baudelaire explains in this introduction, noteworthy was first inspired to try his own give out at composing prose poetry through his reading invoke Bertrand's Gaspard of the Night. Baudelaire confesses king debt to Bertrand as his inspiration in attempting to expand the possibilities of the prose song by applying it to expressions of life instruct in the modern city. Baudelaire states that, while measurement Gaspard of the Night:

for at least the ordinal time . . . the idea came discussion group me to try something similar, and to put into operation to the description of modern life, or quite one modern and more abstract life, the approach [Bertrand] had applied to the depiction of antiquated life, so strangely picturesque.

WHAT DO I STUDY NEXT?

• Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature exert a pull on 1870-1930 (1931), by Edmund Wilson, provides an crucial critical discussion of the symbolist movement and neat influence on such twentieth-century writers as William Tweeny Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Novelist, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.
• Six French Poets illustrate the Nineteenth Century: Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Poet, Mallarmé (2000), edited by E. H. Blackmore cranium A. M. Blackmore, provides a bilingual edition make out French symbolist poetry with an English translation fasten down facing pages.
• French Symbolist Poetry: An Anthology (1980), degrade by John Porter Houston and Mona Tobin General, provides English translations of major works of Nation symbolist poetry.
• The Crisis of French Symbolism (1990), coarse Laurence M. Porter, offers criticism and interpretation light the works of the major symbolist poets Mallarmé, Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud.
• Four French Symbolists: A Sourcebook on Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Maurice Denis (1996), by Russell Methodical. Clement, offers a helpful guide to further variety on the major French symbolist painters.
• Symbolist Theater: Character Formation of an Avant-Garde (1993), by Frantisek Deak, provides discussion of the development of symbolist region in France.
• Models of the Universe: An Anthology assiduousness the Prose Poem (1995), edited by Stuart Friebert and David Young, provides an introduction to method poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries make the first move a variety of writers.
• Debussy in Performance (1999), slash by James R. Briscoe, includes essays on Composer and Symbolism as well as discussion of ruler musical adaptations of Mallarmé's The Afternoon of splendid Faun and Maeterlinck's Pelleas and Melisande.
• Debussy and Rulership World (2001), edited by Jane F. Fulcher, includes an essay on Debussy's participation in the Weekday salons held by Mallarmé.
• Paris and the Nineteenth Century (1992), by Christopher Prendergast, provides historical analysis influence nineteenth-century culture and politics in Paris, France.
• Realism, Realism, and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression induce Europe, 1848 - 1914 (1968), edited by Roland N. Stromberg, offers discussion of major artistic person in charge literary movements in Europe during the period take away which the symbolist movement developed.

Baudelaire further describes dominion "dream" of writing in a form that affiliated elements of poetry and prose:

Which of us has not, in his ambitious days, dreamed of depiction miracle of a poetic prose, musical without metre and without rhyme, supple enough and choppy skimpy to fit the soul's lyrical movements, the downs of reverie, the jolts of consciousness?

Baudelaire first coined the term "prose poem" in reference to spruce group of his own poems published in 1861. He also describes his innovative style of 1 poetry as "fables of modern life." Edward Childish. Kaplan, in an introduction to his 1989 textbook of translations of Little Poems in Prose, observesthat one of the modern elements of Baudelaire's fables is the fact that, unlike traditional fables focus end with a clear moral prescription, they "undermine

‟[WHILE] THE FREE VERSE POEM, INVENTED BY THE SYMBOLISTS, BECAME THE DOMINANT FORM OF POETRY THROUGHOUT Say publicly TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE MODERN PROSE POEM, ALSO Smart BY THE SYMBOLISTS, WAS, UNTIL RECENTLY, RELEGATED Abut A RELATIVELY OBSCURE PLACE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE."

any assuring interpretations." Kaplan further describes this modern element be in possession of moral ambiguity in Baudelaire's prose poetry:

Dismantling all forms of complacency and idealism, the Baudelarian "prose poem" amalgamates, in a dialogically open-ended literary unit, equivocalness and judgment, kindness and cruelty, anger and good will, reveries and analysis. There are no definitive lessons-only responses.

Baudelaire's fifty prose poems were published posthumously run to ground the 1869 volume Little Poems in Prose. Even if Baudelaire did not invent the prose poem, rank works in this volume represent his revolutionizing swelling on the genre. Baudelaire modernized prose poetry lecture profoundly influenced the symbolist poets, many of whose greatest works are prose poems.

The prose poems leverage Little Poems in Prose treat the subject endorse modern urban life in Paris, a topic Poet thought to be especially suited to the instruct of the prose poem. Baudelaire focused on prestige ugliness of urban existence, but regarded his corporate with hopefulness and compassion. While the poems have a high opinion of Flowers of Evil, traditional in form, express grandeur beauty of Paris, the prose poems of Little Poems in Prose focus on the urban uncleanness and human suffering of the modern city.

Following interpose Baudelaire's footsteps, Rimbaud published two major volumes precision prose poetry. As in Baudelaire's Little Poems heritage Prose, Rimbaud in his volume Illuminations explored representation cityscapes of Paris through the form of glory prose poem. Unlike Baudelaire's Paris, Rimbaud's visions elaborate the urban landscape are imbued with a passivity of mystery beneath the squalid surface of contemporary city life. A Season in Hell, Rimbaud's second-best volume of prose poetry, represents an intensely unofficial delving into the poet's spiritual and artistic inner-anguish.

PROSE POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

During the early ordinal century many writers, influenced by the French symbolists, tried their hands at prose poetry. Following rectitude lead of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, the consequent French symbolist writers Paul Valéry, Paul Fort, mount Paul Claudel composed notable prose poems. Important writers outside of France, such as Franz Kafka, Criminal Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson, are along with recognized for their outstanding prose poetry.

However, the text poem throughout most of the twentieth century remained a relatively unpopular form among most readers president critics, as well as most writers. Thus, interminably the free verse poem, invented by the symbolists, became the dominant form of poetry throughout character twentieth century, the modern prose poem, also highlydeveloped by the symbolists, was, until recently, relegated become a relatively obscure place in twentieth-century literature. Blue blood the gentry very form of the prose poem was crowd taken seriously by the majority of literary critics and many writers. As C. W. Truesdale observes in a preface to The Party Train: Fastidious Collection of North American Prose Poetry (1996), nobility prose poem "has never received its critical terminate despite the excitement the form has generated halfway poets themselves." Truesdale describes a general "critical neglect—even hostility" to the prose poem among literary critics throughout most of the twentieth century. Truesdale goes on to assert that the dominance of comfortable verse "has forced the prose poem... to justness sidelines, has marginalized it as a genre."

Beginning timely the 1960s, however, prose poetry gained a remodelled interest among writers, and small literary magazines began to publish prose poetry with increasing frequency. Valuable American writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Parliamentarian Bly contributed to this renewed interest in grandeur prose poem in the 1960s and 1970s. Primacy volume The Prose Poem: An International Anthology (1976), edited by Michael Benedikt, helped to introduce Impartially language readers to a broad range of style poetry.

The 1980s and 1990s saw increased interest creepycrawly the prose poem among English-language writers and editors of small literary journals. During these final decades of the twentieth century, a number of anthologies of prose poetry, as well as volumes observe literary criticism focused on the prose poem, apothegm publication. In the 1990s, journals devoted entirely meet prose poetry, such as The Prose Poem: Swindler International Journal, sprang up to accommodate this thriving interest.

In the late twentieth century, a variety appreciated terms came to designate prose poetry. Because asset the brevity of the prose poem, its marches have also come to overlap with the manifestation of a new form of very short falsehood. Thus, the following terms have been applied cope with the prose poem form: "sudden fiction," "flash fiction," the "modern parable," the "modern fable," the "short short story," and "micro-fiction," among others.

In a 1996 essay entitled "The Poetry of Village Idiots," Physicist Simic defines the prose poem as "an unimaginable amalgamation of lyric poetry, anecdote, fairy tale, exemplum, joke, journal entry, and many other kinds unconscious prose." However, the very definition of prose chime remains a central topic of debate, and almost all English-language anthologies of prose poetry during that period begin with an overview of the uninterrupted debate as to the question of whether assistance not the prose poem exists as a vivid literary form, and, if so, how it power be defined and distinguished from both poetry settle down prose. Nonetheless, nearly all critics and writers take the debt of modern prose poetry to prestige innovations of the French symbolist poets in enlightening the prose poem to the status of pure high art particularly suited to expressions of additional life.

Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on Symbolism, suppose Literary Movements for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

William Franke

In the following essay, Franke examines Baudelaire's shiatsu of symbol, language, and meaning, which brought lurk the beginning of the French Symbolist literary movement.

The process of symbolization begins when one thing obey used to stand for something else. A endocarp thrown into a pit for the purpose show signs counting whatever sort of objects may be reasoned a primitive symbol. A link is thereby phoney between items that have nothing to do liking each other in the nature of things, merely by virtue of the one's being made authorization take the place of the other. Some specified model as this generally informs the notion sponsor the symbol current in linguistics and semiotics innermost in a broad spectrum of empirical disciplines at phenomena of

‟. . . BAUDELAIRE TURNS OUT In the final TO BE MORE INTERESTED IN RECREATING THE Unbroken ORDER OF THINGS AS A LANGUAGE AND Accordingly AS NOT NATURAL. THE IMPLICATION IS LESS Dump LANGUAGE SHOULD RETURN TO A STATE OF Assembly AND MORE NEARLY THE REVERSE-THAT EVEN NATURE Potency BE SUBSUMED INTO LANGUAGE."

signification are studied scientifically. Blue blood the gentry aspect of the symbol that is stressed herbaceous border these fields is its arbitrariness or conventionality sit the fact that it is not the reality it symbolizes, but just some substitute for deafening in the object's absence.

For poets, and generally check aesthetic theory, the symbolic has quite a fluctuating meaning. The symbol distinguishes itself from other types of signs (or as against the sign altogether) by virtue of its making concretely present rectitude thing it signifies. This function of presencing has consistently been described in the language of "participation," with the implication that the symbol is really a part of the larger whole it represents—pars pro toto. In Coleridge's famous formulation, the plural is insignia "always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that union of which it is the representative." Consequently, hill aesthetics the idea of the symbol has tended to imply an intrinsic affinity with what hype symbolized (to the point of being it, shell least in part) and often the fundamental singleness of all things—all things being reflected in picture symbol as in a microcosm or monad. Need addition to the monadology of Leibniz, Hegel's tenet of the concrete universal and Kant's notion worry about an a priori intuition which is not "schematic" but rather "analogical" (Kritik der Urteilskraft, sec. 59) supply some of the German idealistic underpinnings have a thing about this originally romantic conception of the symbol. On important source can be found in magic careful totemism, as is signaled by the interest forfeiture symbolist poets from Baudelaire to Yeats and before, for example, to James Merrill, in the hidden. In occult tradition and lore, the symbol participates in reality to the extent of being disgraceful effectively to transform it, typically through the touch of tokens, rather than remaining just an alien representation devoid of any real efficacy and planning over what it represents (Lévi-Strauss, "L'efficacité").

That the representation is a part of the whole it represents (and by universal analogy this expands to contain the whole universe), that it thereby makes mediate what it signifies, presenting it, precisely, in part, means also that the symbol may be alleged to signify not merely by virtue of meeting but by its "nature." What it actually wreckage in itself and not just what it possibly will be arbitrarily used to stand for determines what the symbol signifies. To say a "sail" was seen on the horizon in order to compulsory that a ship was seen (Coleridge's own example) is in some sense a natural mode mention expression. There is something not entirely arbitrary take notice of using a sail to represent a ship. Tidy ship is indeed in a certain manner bring about in a sail; it is present in reveal. And a sail is, approximately, a ship: make certain is, it is a piece of a ship.

The goal of giving access to nature beneath rank level of social conventions of signification has antique fairly constantly in view throughout the history nominate symbolic expression in poetry: it is epitomized stomachturning the myth of Orpheus as the singer-poet whose music tames beasts and even moves the frozen elements. His mastery over the natural world indicates that his poetry is the very language eliminate nature (Bays). The endeavor to return to put in order state in which language would signify by goodness of its being and intrinsic nature rather get away from by conventions socially imposed was a program as of now of the romantics. Hölderlin's "Nun, nun, müssen lay down one's life Worte dafür, wie Blumen, entstehen" [Now, now, oxidation words therefore like flowers originate] in "Brot a number of Wein" can be taken as emblematic of interpretation need for redis-covering language as a natural inanimate object. This is the ideal of a poetic jargon that would be literally things, in which primacy breach between sign and referent that characterizes (and curses) postlapsarian language would be repaired. The interpreter tradition from Hölderlin to Rilke activates this Occult claim for poetry in a particularly intense final self-conscious, even at times self-ironic, way. The belief often holds a powerful attraction still for virgin poets—as witness the undiminished fascination with Orpheus—however far-off they may be from considering it possible hitch realize.

The art of the symbol, accordingly, at minimal from the romantic period on, was supposed cause somebody to make beings speak, or to provide by class symbol a channel that would make their counselor speech audible. Baudelaire crystallized the idea that slang should ideally be the natural speaking of weird and wonderful in some essential verses in "L'Invitation au voyage":

    Tout y parlerait
    À l'âme en secret
    Sa douce langue natale.

These lapidary lines seem to envisage shipshape and bristol fashion language unmediated by arbitrary conventions and by meanings imposed by practical functions of communication, deaf inhibit the things' own native voices. Things speaking drop a line to the soul in their own native language, tuned to its own inner being, communicate in highmindedness of what they are. What speaks in say publicly symbol or in the space to which Poet voyages in the poem is everything, tout, on account of by universal analogy any particular thing speaking neat sweet native language—that is, the language of things—speaks for all beings and perhaps for being strike. Of course, Baudelaire is also, in decisive attitude, fiercely negative on nature, loathing it as unattractive and evil, yet his "flowers of evil" shape nevertheless themselves produced by descent to precisely that soil in order to transform it into focus. It is all the more necessary, therefore, harmonious begin from these romantic doctrines in order comprise account for his transmutation, in effect a denaturalization, of the symbol.

In the symbolic universe, all elements are interconnected, and all are immanent in in receipt of individual thing. This is to say that class world is composed of correspondences: its qualities "answer to one another," as Baudelaire puts it demand "Correspondances" ("Les parfums, les couleurs et les issue se répondent"), just like the mutually defining smattering of a language. Indeed, as the linguistic analogy of "answering" suggests, the things that make underscore the world, at least as it is reflect in poetry, are the elements of a parlance. Baudelaire was fond of describing all nature tempt a vocabulary for the artist's use ("La makeup n'est qu'un dictionnaire"). However, although he evokes primacy romantic topos of the language of things—as restore in "Elévation": "le langage des fleurs et stilbesterol choses muettes" [the language of flowers and detail mute things]—Baudelaire turns out ultimately to be advanced interested in recreating the whole order of different as a language and therefore as not crucial. The implication is less that language should repay to a state of nature and more not quite the reverse—that even nature might be subsumed test language. Baudelaire's closed, symmetrical stanzaic forms and interpretation interiorization of the world in the supposedly absolute dimension of "cour" contribute to construing reality owing to a language where everything is differentially defined, unexceptional that all elements are ordered by internal dealings into a self-enclosed system. In "L'Invitation au voyage," "things" such as "les soleils mouillés" and "ces ciels brouillés" are not just kindred natural phenomena. They actually create each other in relation have an adverse effect on one another—for example, by the reciprocity of their rhyming and the differential play of assonances gift consonants—in the splendor in which they poetically figure, each as distilled out of the other avoid as fused together into one whole. The familiarity of reading a Baudelaire poem is (or sharpen up least can be) one of being carried leave to a sphere where all things and workable are transubstantiated by appearing within the structural wholes of the poem. The world is presented pass for essentially translated into a poetic idiom and primate articulated in a harmony of purely formal, evenly defining values. Things sublated thus into a practice of correspondences or relative differences have been ignominious essentially into language.

Romantics, and long before them writers of the Middle Ages, had conceived nature pass for language—that is, as a system of signs, privileged, metaphorically, a book. However, the creed that leadership experience of everything as one is a side of the road engendered specifically by poetic language became operational final for the symbolists, and they recognized Baudelaire introduction having opened up this possibility. The sensuously symbolical power of his verse made it a superlative, all-encompassing kind of "seeing" to which a consummate universe accrued. Hence Baudelaire could be hailed introduce voyant and a "vrai dieu" by Rimbaud. Baudelaire's essential achievement and legacy to symbolism is display have convincingly created the experience of how yet (at least as sensed and felt by minor individual) can be known in and as idiolect. Feelings and perceptions themselves become an alphabet difficulty be used according to the grammar of lyric art. Even when it is strongly evocative castigate a specific historical epoch and milieu, Baudelaire's verse rhyme or reason l refers to these external phenomena only as fundamentally transfigured by their representation in and as rhythmical language: "Tout devient allégorie" [All becomes allegory]— "Le Cygne." Baudelaire tended to use allégorie interchangeably meet the term symbole (for example, at the dangle of "Un voyage à Cythère"), since both minister to equally well to indicate the linguistic transfiguration hostilities the real. In this perspective, which is authority soul of symbolism, language is not just precise reality but all reality, and perhaps suprareality chimp well.

Language tends to become identical with all exodus represents in Baudelaire's poetry: it is the suggestion which concretely embodies and becomes symbolically identical meet the whole. This is not to be jumbled with a metaphysical thesis that there is hindrance but language. It is rather a poetic mode of everything becoming accessible to be known symbolically—that is, as identical, on the model of substance and whole, with the concrete, sensuous instance provision the poem itself. A symbol is the impose of a unity that is not completely inclined as such to the senses but is bring out in language through the partial, or rather participatory, identity of symbol and symbolized. The poem brand symbol is, at least in part, what court case represents. This results directly from the drive discuss identity at work in language as symbol. Ethics symbol annexes to itself everything with which image comes into contact. It makes everything it touches over into itself. By virtue of its increase in intensity sensuality and almost hallucinatory inebriation, Baudelaire's language becomes the palpable presentation or incarnation of a largely (symbolic) universe.

The symbol proposes to participate in spruce large reality, but for the symbolist this way, by a logic of supplementarity, that it disparaging up producing virtually, in the element of speech, the reality it was supposed to symbolize. Lying synthetic energy becomes the creative force that constitutes the world it symbolizes. For the symbol interest invested with a force for becoming symbolically probity whole that it is not literally, either unresponsive to throwing things together into unity (symballein) or despite the fact that the part of a token (symbolon) that represents, in the absence of the missing half, high-mindedness whole of which it was originally part. Loftiness drive to identity at work in language chimpanzee symbol is concentrated and heightened by the proportional language of lyric based on symmetries and correspondences—that is, on various forms of repetition of loftiness same; for example, rhythm and rhyme. All specified devices of the lyric imagination serve in illustriousness production of varieties of identity.

Identity that is bogus by the very symbolic nature of language, helpless out and enhanced by the form as exceptional as the intent and meaning of Baudelaire's lapse, surfaces as a totally obsessive trope in clever poem like "L'Invitation au voyage." The incipit—"Mon enfant, ma sour" [My child, my sister]—creates identity at once by its grammar of apposition. This already suggests some collapse of natural boundaries of difference, uncluttered promiscuous mix of distinct kinds of kinship. Industry intimate relations seem to be embraced together keep one, an incestuous intimacy disregarding essential differences halfway progeny and sibling and, implicitly, lover. The nation to which the voyage is directed is strike at least partially or approximately identical with loftiness beloved ("pays qui te ressemble"). The skyscapes innermost weather are for the poet-speaker but the meditating of the beloved's eyes and their stormy interior. Even love and death collapse together in oneness by conjunction: "Aimer à loisir, / Aimer draw in mourir" [To love at leisure, / To attraction and die], as loving here becomes at say publicly same time a suspension of activity and adroit dying. This world of complete identity is uttered finally in the last stanza of the chime in that the ships traveling from the decisive limits of the earth nevertheless move wholly imprisoned the sphere of the beloved's desire: "C'est emit assouvir / Ton moindre désir / Qu'ils viennent du bout du monde" [It is to excretion / Your least desire / That they exploit from the end of the world]. The exterior world here is totally at the service conduct operations, and has no determination or identity independently pleasant, the innerness of desire. By thematizing the regulation of identity in this way, the poem gives a lyric image of how language in point operates in symbolist poetry-namely, by identifying itself concretely with what it represents and erasing the deem between representation and reality, the inner world take the outer.

The intrinsic relation of language and sphere in symbolism is grounded not only in leadership Neo-platonic trope of participation, but also, particularly constitute romantic theorists of the symbol like Coleridge, Playwright, and Hamann, in the language of revelation, Offenbarung, which intimates a prophetic precedent for symbolist poetics. In the biblical tradition of Logos, the Term of God creates all things and, consequently, drop creatures are symbols bespeaking their Creator. Hence that paradigm, too, induces to construing language and false as communicating with, and indeed as intrinsic figure up one another, at the most originary level. Poet explicitly alludes to the Creator Word's becoming meat ("Et verbum caro factum est") in his introduction to Les Fleurs du Mal.

Whether Neoplatonically or biblically backgrounded, whether conceived in terms of participation instance of creation as revelation, symbolist poetics are presumed on a peculiarly privileged relation of language captain world. Indeed the absorption of all reality fund language as poiesis may be taken to nominate the key premise of the entire symbolist make believe. The consequences of this fundamental premise, however, renovation out to be diverse and even contradictory. Initiate the one hand, reality puts up no broaden resistance: all is simply fused into unity delight an exquisite and unrestricted universal harmony forged focal and by language. On the other hand, goodness collapse of all extralinguistic reality into language leaves language empty of real substance and consequently discomposed. Without being anchored to anything real beyond upturn, language has trouble maintaining even its own undividedness and integrity.

The essential tension between these opposite sorts of consequences of its pan-linguisticism can, in detail, be detected in every aspect and dimension prepare symbolist art. Ineluctably, together with the presence sustenance the object in and to the symbol, tight immanence to language, comes also an emptying comment all objective content. The symbol contains everything at a rate of knots within itself, but only at the price near becoming a pure ideality devoid of relation equal anything beyond the purely linguistic sphere. Every 1 external object of language collapses into just uncluttered linguistic artifact. This makes it possible ultimately get entangled dissolve the presumed external sources of language, counting subjectivity and all its attendant postulates, into fabric forces and drives conceived of as working direct manifest immanently in language. And it is that direction in which symbolist poetry subsequent to Poet and down to our own times decisively moves.

Baudelaire used his art of the symbol in plan to discover the mysterious and profound unity ("une ténébreuse et profonde unité") of all things homespun on revelation by the word or on correspondences in a Neoplatonic order of being. But consider it this is peculiarly the poet's prerogative, a hidden reserved for disclosure by the master of contents, suggests that it is a unity that exists essentially in the order of language. As position purely linguistic status of the vision proclaimed twist symbolist poetry becomes more overt, the synthesis Baudelaire's poetry celebrates shows itself to be not unbiased a synthesis of what is supposed to acceptably higher reality but equally, and paradoxically, an dismissal from and avoidance of the real. Hence leadership "double aspect" of symbolism individuated by Paul countrywide Man in his homologous essay "The Double Image of Symbolism." It is because the poet intricate the solitude of his individual consciousness finds herself alienated from the world that he attempts, crucial vain according to de Man, to recover missing unity by means of his symbolic language.

Given that double aspect of symbolism, together with the demand toward an ideal life of unity goes graceful discomfiting and even shocking avowal of the terminal truth of dissolution and death. It is too clear that the ecstatic experiences so ebulliently enjoyed are dependent upon and even transpire advantageous, wholly within, language. Language is the element shoulder which the symbol lives and dies. It decline a synthetic, unifying medium, but it is besides in itself purely formal, empty of substance, top-hole kind of dead artifact destined to be exact with the dead letter of writing. Consequently, cause dejection use to synthesize unity is inevitably artificial. Nobility pure religion of art, practiced self-consciously as splendid calculated linguistic craft or alchemy, is constrained disruption exploit the very sorts of mechanical and news means that the symbolist artist otherwise affects indifference despise. Thus, to the extent that it recap an act of faith, symbolism is almost assuredly in bad faith, for it is acutely ormed of its own artifices and, in effect, touch on the contradiction of striving to synthesize unmediated contact of the whole harmonious unity of things.

This unsafe posture of symbolist poetry is held intact rough Baudelaire, buoyed up on the exuberance of diadem discovery of an almost all-powerful verbal magic. Because the historical distance from this burst of machiavellian inspiration lengthens, it becomes more difficult for rank sheer passion of poetry to either make plus point or render irrelevant the self-deceptions that go be the making of the symbol. It is power of speech that permits the total, unified knowledge sought overstep symbolists, yet language is also at the very time a false, or at least a fancied, element of such knowledge. What is "merely" highfalutin is also in a sense nothing. The void and death with which symbolist voices are straightfaced seductively obsessed has its remote motivations in that predicament. Irrepressibly, this sense of an encroaching liquidate out and annihilation of reality by language asserts itself as a dominant mood throughout French symboliser poetry starting from Baudelaire's own poetry precipitated assay the abyss (le gouffre) opened up by sheltered own infinite expanse unlimited by any reality invalid cannot absorb. Indeed death comes to be figured as the very perfection sought, and the target of knowledge by poetry's symbolic gnosis is signify as being reached precisely in death.

As Walter Benzoin perceived, Baudelaire's poetry presents a challenge to cotton on language in its purity. In introducing his rendition of Tableaux parisiens, he describes his attempt pay homage to translate the pure essence of language itself. Rendering allows pure language "to shine upon the first more fully. It is the task of righteousness translator to release in his own language stray pure language which is under the spell pageant another" (Benjamin 1969, 227). However, while insisting carnival the absoluteness of language, taking inspiration from Baudelaire's poetry, the last work of lyric poetry unwavering European-wide significance ("Die 'Fleurs du mal' sind das letzte lyrische Werk gewesen, das eine europäische Wirkung getan hat"), Benjamin also encompasses the other, indestructible aspect of symbolism in analyzing Baudelaire's lyric charade as a way of coping with shock, representation most distinctive modern experience, as registered first love Baudelaire's poetry. Originally shocking experience can be confronted and digested by being assimilated into a full structure of meaning—that is, essentially as language, on the other hand a language scarred with the traces of hassle. Baudelaire's lyric production represents a highly conscious shift in and as lyric language of lived stimuli that have left the psychic mechanism traumatized, limit Benjamin deciphers beneath the smooth surface of character mellifluous verses the ruptures and impasses of Baudelaire's quintessential experience as inaugural of the modern. Excellence apparent wholeness of language into which experience was lifted by symbolic lyric in fact shows habit to another aspect of language, especially of predictive or messianic language, as consisting essentially in raptures and abrasions. Still on the basis of spoil sublation of reality into language, symbolism's language non-standard thusly reveals quite a different, unsuspected face marked soak materiality and fragmentation. Baudelaire's language read profoundly translates the breakdown that the modern age was witnessing, whereby the aura of things that connects them with their context and past by involuntary retention disintegrates ("Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire").

Benjamin's reflections buttress the two aspects of symbolism and adduce tidy sort of historical, material account of their source. But it is also possible to interpret achieve something the drive toward unity and presence inherent find guilty the symbol converts into disunity and rupture criticism the real by its own internal logic, wedge the very fulfillment of its own impulse confine total unity and the consequent cutting asunder salary the tension between reality and symbol, language esoteric world. The grand symbolic vision of the agreement of All leads not only to a reach the summit of structure or monism of the universe: it entails equally a shattering into autonomous fragments, since dressing-down individual element is wholly self-contained, indeed is outline itself all-containing. The totally relational identity characteristic enjoy language and therefore also of a linguistic existence turns into an equally total self-sufficiency of all particle, since each is endowed with an valid identity already in itself, unconditioned by any come to light relations—all relations having become internal to it. Gratify symbolism, everything has become language, but as unadorned result language no longer mediates anything extra-linguistic. Poor any real content, language becomes purely image shudder, as is suggested by other forms of translator art, purely musical incantation: it is unbounded, however is lacking in any rule or concept specified as only an external limit could provide, queue this leads eventually to language's being threatened still in its own internal cohesion.

The breakup of articulation and of everything in language was to print overtly pursued by Baudelaire's poetic successors, and schedule has been discovered retrospectively as subtext in Poet himself by recent critics, especially in Benjamin's event. It can be understood as resulting ineluctably come across the logic and dynamic of the symbol upturn, with its absolute exigencies of identity, presence meticulous immediacy, achieved no longer just by means closing stages, but actually in and as, language. For on a former occasion language has totally penetrated nature, leaving no overage, nature is turned wholly into artifice. Nature potty no longer supply the paradigm of organic uniformity after which language models itself in romanticism. Quite, everything becomes subject to the nature of patois as an artificial synthesis with no substance captive itself and therefore in a constant state a few dissolution. When the universal identity forged by illustriousness symbol turns into an identity of all communicate language itself, the symbolic order of things appreciation poised to collapse in upon itself, to crush to smithereens in an uncontrolled proliferation of pure form. Baudelaire's transmission of the romantic doctrine of the token radicalizes and in effect reverses it, resulting have as a feature its no longer effecting union with all dump is, but rather causing an alienation from font and the real. Although he at times embraces the idea of a harmoniously ordered universe signal your intention natural correspondences, he lays the groundwork for wear smart clothes undoing in and by the symbol, which becomes the dynamite that explodes the universe eventually bump into Mallarmé's constellations of unmasterable chance. Precisely these decompositional implications of the unrestricted identification of all free language have manifested themselves persistently in the general and direction of symbolist poetry in its happening ever since Baudelaire. (For sometimes contrasting views opinion this descent, see Charles Altieri.)

Baudelaire was a friend in the identificatory power of the symbol, pointer he remained the undisputed master of this resourceful faculty for the symbolist poets that followed him. Yet he did not believe in the end, benevolent Nature in which symbols were supposed get in touch with be embedded, and into which they beckoned tantalizingly, binding all things, including whoever could interpret them, together into one whole. For Baudelaire, this imaginary dream had become a nightmare and, consequently, rank symbol, in significant ways, sinister. Indeed, he was haunted by the symbol and its solicitations pare communion with a Nature that he loathed. Hard cash "Obsession," Baudelaire recoils from nature, from its big forests which frighten him, as do cathedrals in opposition to their windy organs ("Grands bois, vous m'effrayez all right des cathédrales; / Vous hurlez comme l'orgue"). Proceed would like the night to be without stars, for their light speaks to him, and fissure is a known language, whereas he is revel in search rather of the empty, the black tell naked, what is divested of signs and thus devoid of significance:

    Comme tu me plairais, ônuit! needing ces étoiles
    Dont la lumière parle un langage connu!
    Car je cherche le vide, et take-off noir, et le nu!

This constitutes an anguished palinode that effectively retracts the soul's enchantment with description sweet native language of things in "L'Invitation staff voyage." Here Baudelaire is horrified of nature deed its language, indeed of nature as language, see not because it is strange but because pound is all too familiar. The "regards familiers" counterfeit "Correspondances" reappear in order to become terrifying. Primacy forest is experienced as a cathedral whose emphasis is frightfully over-determined, rather than as the clandestinely alluring temple of "Correspondances." Nature now is before now fully codified: the cries of the woods depart reply to one another out of their diminutive ("Répondent les échos de vos De profundis") catch unawares already articulated as a church liturgy. They ding-dong natural rites in a manner reminiscent of "Correspondances," but now precisely their symbolic force makes them a negative, indeed a nightmare experience.

Baudelaire is disgusted not so directly by nature as by high-mindedness significance of nature, which is a form hint human culture, indeed a language. The ocean's waves, with their heaving and tumult, are execrable as they are already found by the mind inside itself ("Je te hais, Océan! tes bonds chunk tes tumultes, / Mon esprit les retrouve hustle lui"), just as the defeated man's bitter giggle full of sobs and insults is found impossible to differentiate the enormous laugh of the sea. Even nightly fails to be other, and darkness—"les ténèbres"—consists conduct yourself canvasses ("des toiles") painted on, or to verbal abuse painted on, by human signs. Nature offers negation escape from the human, and the human has become just as abhorrent as the natural. Grandeur symbolic-linguistic mechanism that reduces everything to language quite good at the bottom of this viciously circular mirroring, since everything that can be reached through tone is reduced to identity. All that is lay is known through the identity of signs common knowledge in the linguistic system: it is all also familiar and too wretched, in effect a cooler house of language from which there is ham-fisted exit.

Of course, what Baudelaire loathes at bottom review himself, because that is what he sees exploit the bottom of Nature. He begins the impetuous struggle to escape himself by crying out back the name of "the other" that is calm the watchword of so much of French, left-bank culture today. What he is trying to flee is the viciously narcissistic self-reflexivity of the symboliser quest that is palpable in a poem adoration "La Chevelure," in which the poet imagines baptism his amorous head into the black ocean bear which "the other" is enclosed:

    Je plongerai ma tête amoureuse d'ivresse
    Dans ce noir océan où l'autre est enfermé ...

The "other" is sought in impetuosity in order to escape the self, but manifestation is indeed already an other that is "enclosed" (enfermé). It risks being confounded with the darkness of the self's own spleen. In the sphere of total identity there is really no pan c weaken the self. The seeker necessarily voyages endlessly behave quest of le nouveau and l'inconnu. The irreconcilable identity of everything is the truth of position symbol that Baudelaire found himself imprisoned by most important from which he chafes to escape. All that he bequeathed to his poetic posterity.

Baudelaire adopts prestige symbol as a basic strategy but denaturalizes existing also denatures it in the process. The regular identification of each with all that is indicative of symbolic vision and the basis for excellence correspondences of things takes a peculiar turn considering that the identification of all things in the logo is taken to be an identity of gifted with language. This is, in effect, what significance symbolists explicitly do, rendering manifest the revolution management poetic language brought about in nuce by Poet. It means that the identities of the symbolizer vision, rather than being natural, indeed the concave structure or essence of nature, turn out give somebody no option but to be purely artificial, indeed nothing but language. In attendance is still an all-pervading logic of identity, on the other hand it takes on a very different significance, stop in midsentence important ways just the opposite of the sense it had in romanticism. The natural order get ahead things is no longer reassuring and restorative, curative human breaches and diseases. The order of chattels is only linguistic and therefore only a sympathy of the human world of cultural artifacts tell in fact already infected with the sickness exert a pull on the self.

Baudelaire pursues to its furthest limits integrity logic of identity inhering in the symbol. Fair enough identifies everything with everything else. But the clarification he obtains is not oneness with the secrecy of nature and the universe (even though take action leaves some traces of a suffering longing engage in an encounter with the Other or the Unknown), but rather an expansion of language so orangutan to actually encompass everything, beyond simply serving kind the instrument of establishing the symbolic identity conclusion all being. It remains only for this highfalutin mechanism to expose itself as such, and result collapse for lack of external support, in instability to produce the brilliant artificial paradises and become constellations of subsequent symbolism. Thus is set decency program that symbolist poets, eminently Rimbaud and Mallarmé, were to follow. It is the linguistic junction and totalizing of the symbol achieved substantially uncongenial Baudelaire that constitutes the premise for the piercing even of language itself, no longer held uninjured by anything beyond it, that was to remark pursued to its furthest extremes by later symboliser poets.

The identification of everything with language has remained an absolutely central preoccupation of French poetry additional poetics in the twentieth century. It is rib issue, for example, in the way Francis Ponge's Le Parti pris des choses hovers between treating words as natural things and then again unkindly unmasking this fiction and fighting against language elation the name of "la chose même," which escapes it. Yet, given the double aspect of probity symbolism inaugurated by Baudelaire's poetry, whereby the dispersal down of language, which collapses from within, belongs together with the absorption by language of character world of things and its becoming itself practised thing (acquiring thereby also the thing's vulnerability chitchat amorcelation, dismemberment, and dissolution), even this sort persuade somebody to buy resistance to the idealizations inherent in language suggests in indirect ways how subsequent poets continue pin down remain Baudelaire's heirs. For although Baudelaire stands brand the great poet of mysterious and profound unification in the symbol, in which domain "Tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté/ Luxe, calme et volupté" [All is but order and beauty / Luxury, sedate and voluptuousness], it is nevertheless possible to mask how this complete freedom from discord and boast external constraint contains the seeds of its overcome destruction—of the shattering of language as total formula into infinite disunity and limitless dis-semination. This psychotherapy the decisive creative innovation that makes Baudelaire's metrics so seminal for symbolist poetry in its widest ramifications.

Source: William Franke, "The Linguistic Turning of blue blood the gentry Symbol: Baudelaire and His French Symbolist Heirs," herbaceous border Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity,editedby Patricia Trig. Ward, Vanderbilt University Press, 2001, pp. 15-28.

René Wellek

In the following essay, Wellek explores the idea strain Symbolism as a literary period encompassing much post-Realism Western literature, and focuses on developing an meticulous system of definition for it.

The term and meaning of symbolism (and symbol) is so vast expert topic that it cannot even be sketched guts the limits of this paper. The word goes back to ancient Greece and, there, had great complex history which has not, I suspect, antediluvian traced adequately in the only history of nobleness term, Max Schlesinger's Geschichte des Symbols, published focal point 1912.

What I want to discuss is something practically more specific: not even symbol and symbolism put in the bank literature but the term and concept of practice as a period in literary history. It glare at, I suggest, be conveniently used as a popular term for the literature in all Western countries following the decline of nineteenth-century realism and factualism and preceding the rise of the

‟THE SYMBOLIST Beginning OF AMERICAN LITERATURE IS STILL PREVALENT TODAY. Ape OWES ITS DOMINANCE TO THE ATTEMPT TO On high THE GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS TO MYTH-MAKERS AND PROVIDERS OF A SUBSTITUTE RELIGION."

new avant-garde movements: futurism, expressionism, surrealism, existentialism, or whatever else. How has bring to a halt come about? Can such a use be justified?

We must distinguish among different problems: the history late the word need not be identical with magnanimity history of the concept as we might these days formulate it. We must ask, on the undeniable hand, what the contemporaries meant by it, who called himself a "symbolist," or who wanted have it in for be included in a movement called "symbolism," person in charge on the other hand, what modern scholarship lustiness decide about who is to be included promote what characteristics of the period seem decisive. Make known speaking of "symbolism" as a period-term located retort history we must also think of its position in space. Literary terms most frequently radiate overexert one center but do so unevenly; they look to stop at the frontiers of some countries or cross them and languish there or, amazingly, flourish more vigorously on a new soil. Calligraphic geography of literary terms is needed which muscle attempt to account for the spread and added of terms by examining rival terms or accidents of biography or simply the total situation sunup a literature.

There seems to be a widespread accord that the literary history of the centuries on account of the end of the Middle Ages can befall divided into five successive periods: Renaissance, baroque, classicalism, romanticism, and realism. Among these terms baroque hype a comparative newcomer which has not been pitch everywhere, though there seems a clear need all-round a name for the style that reacted argue with the Renaissance but preceded classicism. There is, yet, far less agreement as to what term obligated to be applied to the literature that followed rectitude end of the dominance of realism in glory 1880s and 90s. The term "modernism" and wear smart clothes variants, such as the German "Die Moderne," fake been used but have the obvious disadvantage zigzag they can be applied to any contemporary break up. Particularly in English, the term "modern" has unscratched its early meaning of a contrast to prototype antiquity or is used for everything that occurred since the Middle Ages. The Cambridge Modern History is an obvious example. The attempts to separate between the "modern" period now belonging to ethics past and the "contemporaneous" seem forced, at least possible terminologically. "Modo," after all, means "now." "Modernism" moved so broadly as to include all avant-garde make-believe obscures the break between the symbolist period dowel all post-symbolist movements such as futurism, surrealism, existentialism, etc. In the East it is used little a catchall for everything disapproved as decadent, goody-goody, and alienated: it has become a pejorative fame set against the glories of socialist realism.

The old terms were appealed to at the turn get into the century by many theorists and slogan writers, who either believed that these terms are legally binding to all literature or consciously thought of myself as reviving the style of an older time. Some spoke of a new "classicism," particularly make a way into France, assuming that all good art must affront classical. Croce shares this view. Those who mat a kinship with the romantic age, mainly misrepresent Germany, spoke of "Neuromantik," appealing to Friedrich Schlegel's dictum that all poetry is romantic. Realism too asserted its claim, mainly in Marxist contexts, hem in which all art is considered "realistic" or fuming least "a reflection of reality." I need unique allude to Georg Lukács' recent Aesthetik, in which this thesis is repeated with obsessive urgency. Frantic have counted the phrase "Widerspiegelung der Wirklichkeit" press the first volume; it appears 1,032 times. Uncontrollable was too lazy or bored to count undertake in Volume Two. All these monisms endanger primary schemes of literary periodization. Nor can one reasonably satisfied with a dichotomy such as Fritz Strich's "Klassik und Romantik," which leads away from console concepts into a universal typology, a simple autopsy of the world into sheep and goats. Affection many years I have argued the advantage frequent a multiple scheme of periods, since it allows a variety of criteria. The one criterion "realism" would divide all art into realistic and nonrealistic art and thus would allow only one approval adjective: "real" or some variant such as "true" or "lifelike." A multiple scheme comes much come near to the actual variety of the process collide history. Period must be conceived neither as whatever essence which has to be intuited as a-okay Platonic idea nor as a mere arbitrary grandiloquent label. It should be understood as a "regulative idea," as a system of norms, conventions, most important values which can be traced in its watercourse, spread, and decline, in competition with preceding take up following norms, conventions, and values.

"Symbolism" seems the definite term for the dominant style which followed nineteenth-century realism. It was propounded in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) and is assumed as a business of course in Maurice Bowra's Heritage of Symbolism (1943). We must beware, of course, of baffling this historical form with age-old symbolism or dictate the view that all art is symbolic, hoot language is a system of symbols. Symbolism organize the sense of a use of symbols currency literature is clearly omnipresent in literature of repeat styles, periods, and civilizations. Symbols are all-pervasive affix medieval literature and even the classics of realism—Tolstoy and Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens—use symbols, often exceptionally. I myself am guilty of arguing for leadership crucial role of symbol in any definition confiscate romanticism, and I have written at length temptation the long German debate from Goethe to Friedrich Theodor Vischer about the meaning of the designation "symbol" and its contrast to the term "allegory."

For our purposes I want to focus on ethics fortunes of the concept as a term, labour for a school, then as a movement, perch finally as a period. The term "symbolisme" orangutan the designation for a group of poets was first proposed by Jean Moréas, the French lyricist of Greek extraction. In 1885 he was troubled by a journalistic attack on the decadents pulsate which he was named together with Mallarmé. Blooper protested: "the so-called decadents seek the pure Conception and the eternal Symbol in their art, beforehand anything else." With some contempt for the obsession of critics for labels, he suggested the outline "Symbolistes" to replace the inappropriate "décadents." In 1886 Moréas started a review Le Symboliste, which putrefied after four issues. On September 18, 1886, powder published a manifesto of "Symbolisme" in the Figaro. Moréas, however, soon deserted his own brainchild concentrate on founded another school he called the "école romane." On September 14, 1891, in another number intelligent the Figaro Moréas blandly announced that "symbolisme" was dead. Thus "symbolisme" was an ephemeral name use a very small clique of French poets. Nobleness only name still remembered besides Moréas' is Gustave Kahn. It is easy to collect pronouncements outdo the main contemporary poets repudiating the term suggest themselves. Verlaine, in particular, was vehemently resentful trap this "Allemandisme" and even wrote a little rhyme beginning "À bas le symbolisme mythe/et termite."

In clean way which would need detailed tracing, the locution, however, caught on in the later 80s tell off early 90s as a blanket name for new developments in French poetry and its anticipations. Formerly Moréas' manifesto, Anatole Baju, in Décadent, April 10, 1886, spoke of Mallarméas "the master who was the first to formulate the symbolic doctrine." Join critics, Charles Morice, with La Littérature de cry à l'heure (1889) and Téodore de Wyzéwa, whelped in Poland, first in the essay "Le Symbolisme de M. Mallarmé" (1887), seemed to have antediluvian the main agents, though Morice spoke rather noise "synthèse" than of symbol, and Wyzéwa thought meander "symbol" was only a pretext and explained Mallarmé's poetry purely by its analogy to music. Gorilla early as 1894 Saint Antoine (pseudonym for Henri Mazel) prophesied that "undoubtedly, symbolism will be goodness label under which our period will be classed in the history of French literature."

It is calm a matter of debate in French literary description when this movement came to an end. Likelihood was revived several times expressly—e.g. in 1905 family a review, Vers et prose. Its main judge, Robert de Souza, in a series of locution, "Où Nous en sommes" (also published separately, 1906), ridiculed the many attempts to bury symbolism introduction premature and proudly claimed that Gustave Kahn, Verhaeren, Vielé-Griffin, Maeterlinck, and Régnier were then as energetic as ever. Valéry professed so complete an nationality to the ideals of Mallarméthat it is dense not to think of him as a continuator of symbolism, though in 1938, on the incident of the fiftieth anniversary of the symbolist strategy, Valéry doubted the existence of symbolism and denied that there is a symbolist aesthetic. Marcel Novelist, in the post-humously published last volume of fulfil great series Le Temps retrouvé (1926), formulated in particular explicitly symbolist aesthetics. But his own attitude bring under control symbolist contemporaries was often ambiguous or negative. Update 1896 Proust had written an essay condemning cover in poetry. Proust admired Maeterlinck but disliked Péguy and Claudel. He even wrote a pastiche cut into Régnier, a mock-solemn description of a head hibernal. When Le Temps retrouvé (1926) was published accept when a few years later (1933) Valery Lar-baud proclaimed Proust a symbolist, symbolism had, at smallest amount in French poetry, definitely been replaced by surrealism.

André Barre's book on symbolism (1911) and particularly Fellow Michaud's Message poétique du symbolisme (1947), as in shape as many other books of French literary adjustment, have, with the hindsight of literary historians, derived the different phases of a vast French symboliser movement: the first phase, with Baudelaire (who properly in 1867) as the precursor; the second, in the way that Verlaine and Mallarméwere at the height of their powers, before the 1886 group; the third, what because the name became established; and then, in leadership twentieth century, what Michaud calls "Néosymbolisme," represented hunk "La Jeune Parque" of Valéry and L'Annonce faite à Marie of Claudel, both dating from 1915. It seems a coherent and convincing conception which needs to be extended to prose writers cope with dramatists: to Huysmans after A Rebours (1884), check the early Gide, to Proust in part, tube among dramatists, at least to Maeterlinck, who, counterpart his plays L'Intruse and Les Aveugles (1890) squeeze Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), assured a limited discernment of symbolism on the stage.

Knowledge of the Sculptor movement and admiration for it soon spread secure the other European countries. We must, however, discriminate between reporting on French events and even bewilderment shown by translations, and a genuine transfer vital assimilation of the French movement in another information. This process varies considerably from country to country; and the variation needs to be explained near the different traditions which the French importation confronted.

In English, George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (1888) and his Impressions and Opinions (1891) gave sketchy and often poorly informed accounts of Poet, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Laforgue. Mallarmé's poetry is pinkslipped as "aberrations of a refined mind," and symbolisation is oddly defined as "saying the opposite wear out what you mean." The three essays on Mallarmé by Edmund Gosse, all dating from 1893, strengthen hardly more perceptive. After the poet's death Gosse turned sharply against him. "Now that he in your right mind no longer here the truth must be blunt about Mallarmé. He was hardly a poet." Collected Arthur Symons, whose book The Symbolist Movement crush Literature (1899) made the decisive breakthrough for England and Ireland, was very lukewarm at first. Exhaustively praising Verlaine (in Academy,1891) he referred to integrity "brain-sick little school of Symbolistes" and "the jarring little school of Décadents," and even in afterwards articles on Mallarmé he complained of "jargon duct meaningless riddles." But then he turned around submit produced the entirely favorable Symbolist Movement.Itshould not, yet, be overrated as literary criticism or history. Lawful is a rather lame impressionistic account of Nerval, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Maeterlinck, with emphasis on Verlaine. There review no chapter on Baudelaire. But most importantly, representation book was dedicated to W. B. Yeats, promulgating him "the chief representative of that movement tight our country." Symons had made his first faux pas to Paris in 1889; he had visited Mallarmé, met Huys-mans and Maeterlinck, and a year ulterior met Verlaine, who in 1893 became his boarder on his ill-fated visit to London. Symons knew Yeats vaguely since 1891, but they became store friends in 1895 only after Yeats had ready his study of Blake and had elaborated diadem own system of symbols from other sources: enchantment, Blake, and Irish folklore. The edition of Painter Yeats had prepared with Edwin Ellis in 1893 was introduced by an essay on "The Necessary of Symbolism." In 1894 Yeats visited Paris difficulty the company of Symons and there saw unornamented performance of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axël. The thesis "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900) is then Yeats' first full statement of his symbolist creed. Symons' dedication to Yeats shows an awareness of images as an international movement. "In Germany," he says, exaggerating greatly, "it seems to be permeating righteousness whole of literature, its spirit is that which is deepest in Ibsen, it has absorbed authority one new force in Italy, Gabriele D'Annunzio. Mad am told of a group of symbolists twist Russian literature, there is another in Dutch information, in Portugal it has a little school worry about its own under Eugenio de Castro. I unvarying saw some faint stirrings that way in Spain."

Symons should have added the United States. Or could he in 1899? There were intelligent and empathetic reports of the French movement very early. Systematic. S. Perry wrote on "The Latest Literary Course of action in France" in The Cosmopolitan (1892), T. Progeny on "Literary Paris—The New Poetry" in Harper's (1896), and Aline Gorren on "The French Symbolists" hurt Scribner's (1893). The almost forgotten Vance Thompson, who, fresh from Paris, edited the oddly named examine M'lle New York, wrote several perceptive essays, principally on Mallarmé in 1895 (reprinted inFrench Portraits, 1900) which convey some accurate information on his theories and even attempt an explication of his chime with some success. But only James Huneker became the main importer of recent French literature obstruction the United States. In 1896 he defended excellence French symbolists against the slurs in Max Nordau's silly Entartung and began to write a scratch out a living series of articles on Maeterlinck, Laforgue, and numberless others, not bothering to conceal his dependence divorce his French master, Remy de Gourmont, to whom he dedicated his book of essays Visionaries (1905). But the actual impact of French symbolist chime on American writing was greatly delayed. René Taupin, in hisL'Influence du symoblisme français sur la poésie américaine (1929), traced some echoes in forgotten Inhabitant versifiers of the turn of the century, nevertheless only two Americans living then in England, Copyist Pound around 1908 and T. S. Eliot leak out 1914, reflect the French influence in significant poetry.

More recently and in retrospect one hears of wonderful symbolist period in American literature: Hart Crane existing Wallace Stevens are its main poets; Henry Crook, Faulkner, and O'Neill, in very different ways take up in different stages of their career, show considerable affinities with its techniques and outlook. Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931) was apparently the very culminating book which definitely conceived of symbolism as implication international movement and singled out Yeats, Joyce, Playwright, Gertrude Stein, Valéry, Proust, and Thomas Mann gorilla examples of a movement which, he believed, esoteric come to an end at the time rigidity his writing. Here we find the conception formulated which, very generally, is the thesis of that paper and the assumption of many historians in that Wilson's sketch. Wilson's sources were the writings spick and span Huneker, whom he admired greatly, and the understanding in French literature he received in Princeton exotic Christian Gauss. But the insight into the union and continuity of the international movement and character selection of the great names was his purge. We might only deplore the inclusion of Gertrude Stein. But I find it difficult to find creditable that Wilson's book could have had any endurance outside the English-speaking world.

In the United States Wilson's reasonable and moderate plea for an international portage was soon displaced by attempts to make influence whole of the American literary tradition symbolist. Despot. O. Matthiessen's The American Renaissance (1941) is homemade on a distinction between symbol and allegory observe much in the terms of the distinction imported by Goethe. Allegory appears as inferior to symbol: Hawthorne inferior to Melville. But in Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature (1956) the distinction betwixt modern symbolism and the use of symbols manage without romantic authors is completely obliterated. Emerson, Hawthorne, Writer, Melville, and Whitman appear as pure symbolists avant la lettre,and their ancestry is traced back give somebody no option but to the Puritans, who paradoxically appear as incomplete, carrying a chip on one` symbolists. It can be rightly objected that high-mindedness old Puritans were sharply inimical to images roost symbols and that there is a gulf 'tween the religious conception of signs of God's Stroke of luck and the aesthetic use of symbols in representation novels of Hawthorne and Melville and even twist the Platonizing aesthetics of Emerson.

The symbolist conception bear witness American literature is still prevalent today. It owes its dominance to the attempt to exalt excellence great American writers to myth-makers and providers duplicate a substitute religion. James Baird, in Ishmael (1956), puts it unabashedly. Melville is "the supreme prototype of the artistic creator engaged in the point of making new symbols to replace the 'lost' symbols of Protestant Christianity." A very active rage in American criticism expanded symbolist interpretation to make happy types and periods of literature, imposing it be sure about writings which have no such meaning or have to one`s name to be twisted to assume it. Harry Levin rightly complained in an address, " Symbolism become peaceful Fiction" (1956), that "every hero may seem do have a thousand faces; every heroine may elect a white goddess incognita; every fishing trip zigzag out to be another quest for the Sacred Grail." The impact of ideas from the City anthropologists and from Carl Jung is obvious. Dwell in the study of medieval texts a renewed undertone in the fourfold levels of meaning in Dante's letter to Can Grande has persuaded a integral group of American scholars, mainly under the power of D. W. Robertson, to interpret or underestimate Chaucer, the Pearl poet, and Langland in these terms. They should bear in mind that Clocksmith Aquinas recognized only a literal sense in swell work invented by human industry and that take action reserved the other three senses for Scripture. Position symbolist interpretation reaches heights of ingenuity in magnanimity writing of Northrop Frye, who began with undiluted book on Blake and, in The Anatomy get through Criticism (1957), conceived of the whole of data as a self-enclosed system of symbols and folklore, "existing in its own universe, no longer smart commentary on life or reality, but containing philosophy and reality in a system of verbal relationships." In this grandiose conception all distinctions between periods and styles are abolished: "the literary universe silt a universe in which everything is potentially very alike with everything else." Hence the old distinctions amidst myth, symbol, and allegory disappear. One of Frye's followers, Angus Fletcher, in his book on Allegory (1964), exalts allegory as the central procedure strip off art, while Frye still holds fast to imagery, recognizing that "the critics are often prejudiced despoil allegory without knowing the real reason, which not bad that continuous allegory prescribes the direction of authority commentary, and so restricts his freedom."

The story disruption the spread of symbolism is very different welcome other countries. The effect in Italy was supposedly rather small. Soffici's pamphlet on Rimbaud in 1911 is usually considered the beginning of the Sculptor symbolist influence, but there was an early missionary for Mallarmé,Vittorio Pica, who was heavily dependent joy French sources, particularly Teódor de Wyzéwa. His expression, in the Gazetta letteraria (1885-86), on the Gallic poets do not use the term; but distort 1896 he replaced "decadent" and "Byzantine" by "symbolist." D'Annunzio, who knew and used some French symbolists, would be classed as "decadent" today, and interpretation poets around Ungaretti and Montale as "hermetic." Unfailingly a recent book by Mario Luzi, L'Idea simbolista (1959), Pascoli, Dino Campana, and Arturo Onofri detain called symbolist poets, but Luzi uses the impermanent so widely that he begins his anthology magnetize symbolism with Hölderlin and Novalis, Coleridge and Poet, and can include Poe, Browning, Patmore, Swinburne, Moneyman, and Francis Thompson among its precursors. Still, crown list of symbolist poets, French, Russian, English, Teutonic, Spanish, and Greek, is, on the whole, sober. Onofri was certainly strongly influenced by Mallarmé tell off later by Rudolf Steiner; Pascoli, however, seems be adjacent to me no symbolist in his poetry, though agreed gave extremely symbolist interpretations of Dante. It lustiness be wiser to think of "ermetismo" as integrity Italian name for symbolism: Montale and possibly Dino Campana are genuine symbolists.

While symbolism, at least bit a definite school or movement, was absent feature Italy, it is central in the history locate Spanish poetry. The Nicaraguan poet Rubeń Darío initiated it after his short stay in Paris rerouteing 1892. He wrote poems under the symbolist way and addressed, for instance, a fervent hymn hitch Verlaine. The influence of French symbolist poetry different completely the oratorical or popular style of Nation lyrical poetry. The closeness of Guillén to Mallarmé and Valéry seems too obvious to deny, build up the Uruguayan poet Julio Herrera y Reissig (1873-1909) is clearly in the symbolist tradition, often nominate the obscurest manner. Still, the Spanish critics benefit the term "Modernismo," which is used sometimes as follows inclusively that it covers all modern Spanish poem and even the so-called "generation of 1898," authority prose writers Azorín, Baroja, and Unamuno, whose communications with symbolism were quite tenuous. "Symbolism" can learn only to one trend in modern Spanish culture, as the romantic popular tradition was stronger at hand than elsewhere. García Lorca's poetry can serve considerably the best known example of the peculiar Country synthesis of the folksy and the symbolical, glory gypsy song and the myth. Still, the permanence from Darío to Jimeńez, Antonio Machado, Alberti, sports ground then to Guillén seems to me evident. Jorge Guillén in his Harvard lectures, Language and Poetry (1961), finds "no label convincing." "A period look," he argues, does not signify a "group style." In Spain there were, he thinks, fewer "isms" than elsewhere and the break with the ago was far less abrupt. He reflects that "any name seeking to give unity to a verifiable period is the invention of posterity." But decide eschewing the term "symbolism," he characterizes himself trip his contemporaries well enough by expounding their regular creed: their belief in the marriage of Given and music-in short, their belief in the paragon of Mallarmé. Following a vague suggestion made encourage Remy de Gourmont, the rediscovery of Góngora manage without Ortega y Gasset, Gerardo Diego, Dámaso Alonso, beam Alfonso Reyes around 1927 fits into the picture: they couple Góngora and Mallarmé as the shine unsteadily poets who in the history of all chime have gone furthest in the search for complete poetry, for the quintessence of the poetic.

In Deutschland the spread of symbolism was far less comprehensive than Symons assumed in 1899. Stefan George locked away come to Paris in 1889, had visited Mallarmé and met many poets, but after his transmit to Germany he avoided, I assume deliberately, integrity term "symbolism" for himself and his circle. Recognized translated a selection from Baudelaire (1891) and second-class samples from Mallarmé,Verlaine, and Régnier (in Zeitgenössische Dichter, 1905), but his own poetry does not, Comical think, show very close parallels to the Country masters. Oddly enough, the poems of Vielé-Griffin look like to have left the most clearly discernible stay on George's own writings. As early as 1892 one of George's adherents, Carl August Klein, protested in George's periodical, Blätter für die Kunst, harm the view of George's dependence on the Nation. Wagner, Nietzsche, Böcklin, and Klinger, he says, communicate that there is an indigenous opposition to realism in Germany as everywhere in the West. Martyr himself spoke later of the French poets monkey his "former allies," and in Gundolf's authoritative restricted area on George the French influence is minimized, pretend not completely denied. Among the theorists of significance George circle Friedrich Gundolf had the strongest translator leanings: Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911) tube Goethe(1916) are based on the distinction of symbol-allegory, with symbol always the higher term. Still, say publicly term symbolism did not catch on in Deutschland as a name for any specific group, even if Hofmannsthal—e.g. in "Das Gespäch über Gedichte" of 1903—proclaimed the symbol the one element necessary in metrics. Later, the influence of Rimbaud—apparently largely in European translation—Iron Georg Trakl has been demonstrated with reality. But if we examine German books on twentieth-century literature, symbolism seems rarely used. I found a-okay section so called in Willi Duwe's Die Dichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (1936) which includes Hofmannsthal, Dauthendey, Calé, Rilke, and George, while E. H. Lüth's Literatur als Geschichte (Deutsche Dichtung von 1885 bis 1947), published in 1947, treats the same poets under the label "Neuromantik und Impressionismus." Later, subdue, we find a section, "Parasymbolismus," which deals convene Musil and Broch. Hugo Friedrich, in his Struktur der modernen Lyrik (1956), avoids the terms instruction argues that the quick succession of modernist styles-dadaism, surrealism, futurism, expressionism, unanimism hermetism, and so on—creates an optical illusion which hides the fact give evidence a direct continuity through Mallarmé,Valéry, Guillén, Ungaretti, survive Eliot. The little anthology in the back assault the book adds St. John Perse, Jiménez, García Lorca, Alberti, and Montale to these names. Friedrich's list seems to me the list of justness main symbolist poets, even though Friedrich objects covenant the name. Clearly, German literary scholarship has grizzle demand been converted to the term, though Wolfgang Kayser's article "Der europaïsche Symbolismus" (1953) had pleaded on line for a wide concept in which he included, transparent addition to the French poets, D'Annunzio, Yeats, Valéry, Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner.

In Russia we exhume the strongest symbolist group of poets who alarmed themselves that. The close links with Paris parallel that time may help to explain this, combine possibly also the strong consciousness of a customs of symbolism in the Russian Church and serve some of the Orthodox thinkers of the instant past. Vladimir Solovëv was regarded as a vanguard. In 1892 Zinaida Vengerova wrote a sympathetic credit of the French symbolists for Vestnik Evropy, extent in the following year Max Nordau's Entartung caused a sensation by its satirical account of latest French poetry which had repercussions on Tolstoy's What is Art?, as late as 1898. Bryusov emerged as the leading symbolist poet: he translated Maeterlinck's L'Intruse and wrote a poem "Iz Rimbaud" variety early as 1892. In 1894 he published bend in half little volumes under the title Russkie simvolisty. Guarantee year Bryusov wrote poems with titles such tempt "In the Spirit of the French Symbolists" subject "In the Manner of Stéphane Mallarmé" (though these were not published till 1935) and brought scholarly a translation of Verlaine's Romances sans paroles. Bryusov had later contacts with René Ghil, Mallarmé's scholar, and derived from him the idea of "instrumentation" in poetry which was to play such systematic great role in the theories of the Native Formalists. In the meantime Dimitri Merezhkovsky had, require 1893, published a manifesto: On the Causes influence the Decline and the New Trends of New Russian Literature, which recommended symbolism, though Merezhkovsky appealed to the Germans: to Goethe and the romantics rather than to the French. Merezhkovsky's pamphlet foreshadows the split in the Russian symbolist movement. Blue blood the gentry younger men, Blok and Vyache-slav Ivanov as all right as Bely, distanced themselves from Bryusov and Balmont. Blok, in an early diary (1901-02), condemned Bryusov as decadent and opposed to his Parisian imagery his own, Russian, rooted in the poetry admire Tyutchev, Fet, Polonsky, and Solovëv. Vyacheslav Ivanov suspend 1910 shared Blok's view. The French influence seemed to him "adolescently unreasonable and, in fact, whine very fertile," while his own symbolism appealed express Russian nationalism and to the general mystical charitable trust. Later Bely was to add occultism and Rudolf Steiner and his "anthroposophy." The group of poets who called themselves "Acmeists" (Gulmilëv, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam) was a direct outgrowth of symbolism. Birth mere fact that they appealed to the inauspicious symbolist Innokenty Annensky shows the continuity with symbolization in spite of their distaste for the hidden and their emphasis on what they thought disbursement as classical clarity. Symbolism dominates Russian poetry in the middle of about 1892 and 1914, when Futurism emerged bit a slogan and the Russian Formalists attacked distinction whole concept of poetry as imagery.

If we scan at the other Slavic countries we are mannered by the diversity of their reactions. Poland was informed early on about the French movement, additional Polish poetry was influenced by the French symbolizer movement, but the term "Młasoda Polska" was best-loved. In Wilhelm Feld-mann's Współczesna literatura polska (1905) advanced poetry is discussed as "decadentism," but Wyspiański (a symbolist if ever there was one) appears beneath the chapter heading: "On the Heights of Romanticism." All the histories of Polish literature I fake seen speak of "Modernism," "Decadentism," "Idealism," "Neo-romanticism," gift occasionally call a poet such as Miriam (Zenon Przesmycki) a symbolist, but they never seem disperse use the term as a general name patron a period in Polish literature.

In Czech literature prestige situation was more like that in Russia: Br̆ezina, Sova, and Hlavéc̆ek were called symbolists, and rank idea of a school or at least excellent group of Czech symbolist poets is firmly mighty. The term "Moderna" (possibly because of the serial Moderní Revue, founded in 1894) is definitely allied with decadentism, fin de siècle, a group nominal by Arnos̆t Procházka. A hymnical, optimistic, even period poet such as Br̆ezina cannot and could battle-cry be classed with them. The great critic Despot. X. S̆alda wrote of the "school of symbolists" as early as 1891, calling Verlaine, Villiers, status Mallarmé its masters but denied that there comment a school of symbolists with dogmas, codices, tell off manifestoes. His very first important article, "Synthetism cattle the New Art" (1892), expounded the aesthetics detailed Morice and Hennequin for the benefit of grandeur Czechs, then still mainly dependent on German models.

The unevenness of the penetration of both the feel of the French movement and very strikingly encourage the acceptance of the term raises the inquiry whether we can account for these differences thump causal terms. It sounds heretical or obscurantist knoll this age of scientific explanation to ascribe some to chance, to casual contacts, and to physical predilections. Why was the term so immensely in effect in France, in the United States, and inspect Russia, less so in England and Spain, bear hardly at all in Italy and Germany? Rope in Germany there was even the tradition of primacy continuous debate about symbol since Goethe and Schelling; before the French movement Friedrich Theodor Vischer under discussion the symbol elaborately and still the term sincere not catch on. One can think of done kinds of explanations: a deliberate decision by significance poets to distance themselves from the French developments; or the success of the terms "Die Moderne" and "Neuromantik." Still, the very number of much explanations suggests that the variables are so entirety that we cannot account for these divergencies joist any systematic manner.

If we, at long last, rotate to the central question of what the defined content of the term is, we must plainly distinguish among the four concentric circles defining secure scope. At its narrowest, "symbolism" refers to honesty French group which called itself "symbolist" in 1886. Its theory was rather rudimentary. These poets principally wanted poetry to be non-rhetorical-i.e. they asked perform a break with the tradition of Hugo become more intense the Parnassiens. They wanted words not merely acquaintance state but to suggest; they wanted to budge metaphors, allegories, and symbols not only as finery but as organizing principles of their poems; they wanted their verse to be "musical," in handle to stop using the oratorical cadences of significance French alexandrines, and in some cases to open completely with rhyme. Free verse—whose invention is customarily ascribed to Gustave Kahn—was possibly the most constant achievement which has survived all vicissitudes of variety. Kahn himself in 1894 summed up the teaching simply as "antinaturalism, antiprosaism in poetry, a give something the onceover for freedom in the efforts in art, reclaim reaction against the regimentation of the Parnasse current the naturalists." This sounds very meager today: selfgovernment from restrictions has been, after all, the battle cry of a great many movements in art.

It job better to think of "symbolism" in a thicken sense: as the broad movement in France running away Nerval and Baudelaire to Claudel and Valéry. Amazement can restate the theories propounded and will facsimile confronted by an enormous variety. We can depict it more concretely and say, for example, depart in symbolist poetry the image becomes "thing." Grandeur relation of tenor and vehicle in the image is reversed. The utterance is divorced, we can add, from the situation: time and place, life and society, are played down. The inner nature, the durée, in the Bergsonian sense, is token or often merely hinted at as "it," distinction thing or the person hidden. One could declare that the grammatical predicate has become the foray. Clearly such poetry can easily be justified newborn an occult view of the world. But that is not necessary: it might imply a cheekiness for analogy, for a web of correspondences, neat as a pin rhetoric of metamorphoses in which everything reflects all things else. Hence the great role of synesthesia, which, though rooted in physiological facts and found repeated over the history of poetry, became at depart time merely a stylistic device, a mannerism hands down imitated and transmitted. This characterization could be elaborate considerably if we bear in mind that bargain and world view go together and only manufacture can define the character of a period unsolved even of a single poet.

Let me try top show, at least, how diverse and even inapposite were the theories of two such related poets as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Baudelaire's aesthetic is chiefly "romantic," not in the sense of emotionalism, personality worship, and exaltation of the ego, central misrepresent French romanticism, but rather in the English discipline German tradition of a glorification of creative optical illusion, a rhetoric of metamorphoses and universal analogy. Despite the fact that there are subsidiary strands in Baudelaire's aesthetics, lose ground his finest he grasps the role of tendency, "constructive imagination," as he calls it in span term ultimately derived from Coleridge. It gives spick metaphysical meaning, "a positive relation with the infinite." Art is another cosmos which transforms and therefore humanizes nature. By his creation the artist abolishes the gulf between subject and object, man service nature. Art is "to create a suggestive occultism containing at one and the same time honesty object and the subject, the external world arena the artist himself."

Mallarmé says almost the opposite snare spite of some superficial resemblances and the general attachment to Poe and Wagner. Mallarmé was description first poet radically discontent with the ordinary patois of communication; he attempted to construe an genuine separate language of poetry far more consistently amaze older cultivators of "poetic diction" such as illustriousness practitioners of trobar clus,or Góngora, or Mallarmé's latest, Gerard Manley Hopkins. His aim of transforming expression was, no doubt, in part negative: to omit society, nature, and the person of the bard himself. But it was also positive: language was again to become "real," language was to remedy magic, words were to become things. But that is not, I think, sufficient reason to call out Mallarméa mystic. Even the depersonalization he requires remains not mystical. Impersonality is rather objectivity, Truth. Find a bed reaches for the Idea, which is ultimately indescribable, because so abstract and general as to cast doubt on devoid of any concrete traits. The term "flower" seems to him poetic because it suggests magnanimity "one, absent from all bouquets." Art thus stool only hint and suggest, not transform as case should in Baudelaire. The "symbol" is only sole device to achieve this effect. The so-called "negative" aesthetics of Mallarméis thus nothing obscure. It difficult to understand its psychological basis in a feeling of barrenness, impotence, and final silence. He was a purist who proposed something impossible of fulfillment: the volume to end all books. "Everything on earth exists to be contained in a book." Like various poets before him, Mallarméwants to express the solitude of the universe but feels that this seclusion is not only insoluble and immensely dark nevertheless also hollow, empty, silent, Nothingness itself. There seemsnoneedtoappealtoBuddhism,Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Wagner to account for this. Interpretation atmosphere of nineteenth-century pessimism and the general Neoplatonic tradition in aesthetics suffice. Art searches for ethics Absolute but despairs of ever reaching it. Primacy essence of the world is Nothingness, and depiction poet can only speak of this Nothingness. Fill alone survives in the universe. Man's main m‚tier is to be an artist, a poet, who can save something from the general wreckage disregard time.Theworkor,inMallarmé's terms, the Book is suspended over honourableness Void, the silent godless Nothingness. Poetry is stubbornly cut off from concrete reality, from the declaration of the personality of the poet, from sizeable rhetoric or emotion, and becomes only a Symbol, signifying Nothing. In Baudelaire, on the other neighbouring, poetry transforms nature, extracts flowers from evil, conceives a new myth, reconciles man and nature.

But pretend we examine the actual verse of the symbolists of this period, we cannot be content attain formulas either of creative imagination, of suggestion, sneak of pure or absolute poetry.

On the third become wider circle of abstraction we can apply the name to the whole period on an international superior. Every such term is arbitrary, but symbolism sprig be defended as rooted in the concepts have a high opinion of the period, as distinct in meaning, and introduce clearly setting off the period from that former it: realism or naturalism. The difference from mawkishness may be less certainly implied. Obviously there go over a continuity with romanticism, and particularly German emotionalism, also in France, as has been recently argued again by Werner Vordtriede in his Novalis come to pass die französischen Symbolisten (1963). The direct contact incessantly the French with the German romantics came brandish and should not be overrated. Jean Thorel, instruction "Les Romantiques allemandes et les symbolistes français," seems to have been the first to point bring forward the relation. Maeterlinck's article on Novalis (1894) final his little anthology (1896) came late in loftiness movement. But Wagner of course mediated between influence symbolists and German mythology, though Mallarmé's attitude, admiring toward the music, was tinged with irony famine Wagner's subject matter. Early in the century Heine, a romantique défroqué as he called himself, moved the role of an intermediary which, to nuts mind, has been exaggerated in Kurt Weinberg's interpret, Henri Heine: Héraut du symbolisme français (1954). Hook up. T. A. Hoff-mann, we should not forget, was widely translated into French and could supply supernatural motifs, a transcendental view of music, and influence theory and practice of synesthesia.

Possibly even more manager were the indirect contacts through English writers: safety Carlyle's chapter on symbolism in Sartor Resartus leading his essay on Novalis; through Coleridge, from whom, through another intermediary, Mrs. Crowe, Baudelaire drew dominion definition of creative imagination; and through Emerson, who was translated by Edgar Quinet.

Also, French thinkers confiscate the early nineteenth century knew the theory forged symbolism at least, from the wide application get snarled all the religions of the world made overtake Creuzer, whose Symbolik was translated into French recovered 1825. Pierre Leroux used the idea of "symbolic poetry" prominently in the early thirties. There was Edgar Allan Poe, who drew on Coleridge attend to A. W. Schlegel and seemed so closely collection anticipate Baudelaire's views that Baudelaire quoted him whereas if he were Poe himself, sometimes dropping vagrant quotations marks.

The enormous influence of Poe on influence French demonstrates, however, most clearly the difference halfway romanticism and symbolism. Poe is far from exploit a representative of the romantic world-view or persuade somebody to buy the romantic aesthetic, in which the imagination decline conceived as transforming nature. Poe has been fitly described as an "angel in a machine": powder combines a faith in technique and even profession, a distrust of inspiration, a rationalistic eighteenth-century commit to memory with a vague occult belief in "supernal" spirit. The distrust of inspiration, an enmity to form, is the crucial point which sets off imagery from romanticism. Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry all intonation it; while Rilke, a symbolist in many nigh on his procedures and views, appears as highly fictional in his reliance on moments of inspiration. That is why Hugo Friedrich excludes him from sovereign book on the modern lyric and even disparages him in a harsh passage. This is reason the attempt to make Mallarmé a spiritual heir of Novalis, as Vordtriede tried, must fail. Mallarmé, one might grant, aims at transcendence, but destroy is an empty transcendence, while Novalis rapturously adores the unity of the mysterious universe. In subsequently, the romantics were Rousseauists; the symbolists, beginning uneasiness Baudelaire, believe in the fall of man do an impression of, if they do not use the religious language, know that man is limited and is call for, as Novalis believed, the Messiah of nature. Justness end of the romantic period is clearly pronounced by the victory of positivism and scientism, which soon led to disillusionment and pessimism. Most symbolists were non-Christians and even atheists, even if they tried to find a new religion in enchantment or flirted with Oriental religions. They were pessimists who need not have read Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, as Laforgue did, to succumb brand the mood of decadence, fin de siècle, Götterdämmerung, or the death of God prophesied by Nietzsche.

Symbolism is also clearly set off from the newborn avant-garde movements after 1914: futurism, cubism, surrealism, expressionism, and so on. There the faith in idiom has crumbled completely, while in Mallarmé and Valéry language preserves its cognitive and even magic power: Valéry's collection of poems is rightly called Charmes. Orpheus is the mythological hero of the versifier, charming the animals, trees, and even stones. Have a crush on more recent art the view of analogy disappears: Kafka has nothing of it. Postsymbolist art evenhanded abstract and allegorical rather than symbolic. The presence, in surrealism, has no beyond: it wells, tiny most, from the subconscious of the individual.

Finally, helter-skelter is the highest abstraction, the wide largest circle: the use of "symbolism" in all literature, worry about all ages. But then the term, broken loosen from its historical moorings, lacks concrete content suggest remains merely the name for a phenomenon nearly universal in all art.

These reflections must lead take care of what only can be a recommendation, to stultify the third sense of our term, to hail the period of European literature roughly between 1885 and 1914 "symbolism," to see it as contain international movement which radiated originally from France nevertheless produced great writers and great poetry also to another place. In Ireland and England: Yeats and Eliot; change into the United States: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane; in Germany: George, Rilke, and Hofmannsthal; in Russia: Blok, Ivanov, and Bely; in Spain and Southerly America: Darío, Machado, and Guillén. If we, sort we should, extend the meaning of symbolism maneuver prose, we can see it clearly in leadership late Henry James, in Joyce, in the following Thomas Mann, in Proust, in the early Writer and Faulkner, in D. H. Lawrence; and pretend we add the drama, we recognize it flowerbed the later stages of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann, and in O'Neill. There is symbolist criticism draw round distinction: an aesthetics in Mallarmé and Valéry, ingenious looser creed in Remy de Gourmont, in Poet, and in Yeats, and a flourishing school pattern symbol-ist interpretation, particularly in the United States. Yet of the French "new criticism" is frankly interpreter. Roland Barthes' new pamphlet, Critique et vérité (1966), pleads for a complete liberty of symbolist interpretation.

Still, we must not forget our initial reminder. Efficient period concept can never exhaust its meaning. Middle-of-the-road is not a class concept of which honesty individual works are cases. It is a regulatory idea: it struggles with preceding and following teaching of art. In the time under consideration class strength of the survivals was particularly great: Haupt-mann's Die Weber was performed in the same twelvemonth (1892) as Blätter für die Kunst began come close to appear; Blok's Poems on the Beautiful Lady were written in the same year (1901) as Gorky's Lower Depths. Within the same author and unvarying within the same work of art the struggling was waged at times. Edmond Jaloux called Author "at the same time a realist and clean symbolist." The same is true of Proust topmost Mann. Ulysses combines symbolism and naturalism, as thumb other book of the time, into a conjunction of grand proportion and strong tension. In Trieste Joyce lectured on two English writers and goal two English writers alone: they were characteristically Author and Blake.

As agreement on the main periods presentation European literature grows, so agreement to add loftiness period term "symbolism" to the five periods at once accepted should increase. But even were a bamboozling term to be victorious (though none I buttonhole think of seems to me even remotely preferable), we should always recognize that such a honour has fulfilled its function as a tool break into historiography if it has made us think band only about individual works and authors but miscomprehend schools, trends, and movements and their international increase. Symbolism is at least a literary term which will help us to counteract the dependence put a stop to much literary history on periodization derived from civil and social history (such as the term " Imperialism" used in Marxist literary histories, which critique perfectly meaningless applied to poetry at that time). Symbolism is a term (and I am quoting the words I applied to baroque in 1945) "which prepares for synthesis, draws our minds whittle away at from the mere accumulation of observations and information, and paves the way for a future record of literature as a fine art."

Source: René Wellek, "The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Donnish History," in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism, University University Press, 1970, pp. 90-121.

SOURCES

Baudelaire, Charles, The Frenchwoman Prowler: Le Spleen de Paris, Petits poèmes reasonable prose, translated by Edward K. Kaplan, University spick and span Georgia Press, 1989, pp. 129-30.

Feinstein, Elaine, "Poem lecture the End," in American Scholar, Vol. 73, Clumsy. 2, Spring 2004, p. 154.

Franke, William, "The Artificial Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and His Nation Symbolist Heirs," in Baudelaire and the Poetics matching Modernity, edited by Patricia A. Ward, Vanderbilt Lincoln Press, 2001, p. 15.

Kaplan, Edward K., ed., Prologue, in The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen de Town, Petits poèmes en prose, University of Georgia Small, 1989, pp. x-xi.

Kudrova, Irma, Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva, Overlook, 2004.

Schweitzer, Victoria, Tsvetaeva, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993.

Simic, River, "The Poetry of Village Idiots," in Verse, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1996, pp. 7-8, quoted accomplish The Best of "The Prose Poem: An Universal Journal," edited by Peter Johnson, White Pine Conquer, 2000, p. 13.

Truesdale, C. W., Preface, in The Party Train: A Collection of North American Text Poetry, edited by Robert Alexander, Mark Vinz, stomach C. W. Truesdale, New Rivers Press, 1996, possessor. xix.

FURTHER READING

Carter, A. E., Paul Verlaine, Twayne, 1971.

Carter provides an authoritative biography of Paul Verlaine, get someone on the blower of the founders of the French symbolist current in poetry.

Eisenman, Stephen, The Temptations of Saint Redon: Biography, Ideology, and Style in the Noirs rivalry Odilon Redon, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Eisenman provides discussion of thematic and stylistic elements of glory symbolist works of Odilon Redon, a major Nation symbolist artist.

Fowlie, Wallace, Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: High-mindedness Rebel as Poet, Duke University Press, 1993.

Fowlie offers a comparison of the nineteenth-century French symbolist poetess Rimbaud and the 1960s American rock star Jim Morrison. Fowlie asserts that both Rimbaud and Author expressed a similar sense of rebellion in their art and that both figures stand as today's antiheroes.

Kolakowski, Leszek, The Alienation of Reason: A Story of Positivist Thought, Doubleday, 1968.

Kolakowski provides a progressive overview of the development of positivist thinking. Decency symbolist movement arose in part as a feedback against the positivist ideals of rational, objective route and scientific method that dominated nineteenth-century thought.

Kudrova, Irma, Death of a Poet: The Last Days oust Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Mary Anne Szporluk, Remove Duckworth, 2004.

Kudrova tells the terrible account of Tsvetaeva's life after her return to the Soviet Uniting using new information, including KGB documents. Tsvetaeva was a talented poet overcome by the circumstances have a high opinion of Stalinist Russia. She chose to end her assured in August 1941.

Lacambre, Geneviève, Gustave Moreau: Magic cope with Symbols, Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

Lacambre provides discussion disparage the life and work of Gustave Moreau, exceptional major French symbolist painter.

Millan, Gordon, A Throw recall the Dice: The Life of Stephen Mallarmé, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Millan provides a biography lift the French symbolist poet Mallarmé.

Peyre, Henri, Baudelaire: Natty Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1962.

Peyre offers carping discussion of the poetry of Baudelaire, a vital French poet often noted as the grandfather pay no attention to Symbolism.

Robb, Graham, Rimbaud, Norton, 2000.

Robb provides a history of Rimbaud, a major French symbolist poet.

Literary Movements for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism world power Literary Movements