Symbolism

Symbolism, symbolist, a movement associated with a group of French writers during c.1880–95. It may be seen as a reaction against dominant realist and naturalist tendencies in literature generally and, in the case of poetry, against the descriptive precision and ‘objectivity’ of the Parnassians. The symbolists stressed the priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy. Symbolist writers were particularly concerned to explore the musical properties of language, through the interplay of connotative sound relationships, but were deeply interested in all the arts and much influenced by the synthesizing ideals of Wagner's music dramas. Other influences on the movement were the mystical writings of Swedenborg, and the poetry of Nerval, Baudelaire, and Poe.

Generally associated with the symbolist movement are: the poets Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Laforgue; the dramatists Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Maeterlinck, and the novelists Huysmans and Édouard Dujardin. The movement exercised an influence on painting and on a wide range of 20th-cent. writers including Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. Stevens, Yeats, Joyce, V. Woolf, Claudel, Valéry, Stefan George, and Rilke. It was the subject of A. W. Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) and played a part in the development of the Russian symbolist movement and of the modernista movement in Latin America.