The Symbolist Movement in Literature

First published in 1899, The Symbolist Movement in Literature was a highly influential work of criticism and introduced the French Symbolists to an Anglophone readership. Arthur Symons’s interest in writers such as Verlaine and Mallarmé puts him at the heart of contemporary debates about Decadence and Symbolism in fin-de-siècle literature, but his work was also a formative influence on modernist writers such as James Joyce, George Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats, helping to shape the role of the Image in modernist writing. This new critical edition makes available a key text that has been out of print for more than 50 years. It includes an introduction, chronology, and notes, together with appendices presenting the full text of Symons’ essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature” and a selection of his translations of French poetry.

Matthew Creasy is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has published essays and articles on the work of William Empson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Arthur Symons lived in London, where he frequented the Rhymers’ Club, a group of writers who met at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street between 1891 and 1894. A friend of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and Oscar Wilde, he was an important influence on William Butler Yeats. He contributed to The Yellow Book and became editor of The Savoy. He died in 1945.

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