Arthur Symons
born Feb. 28, 1865, Milford Haven,
Pembrokeshire, Eng.
died Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham, Kent
poet and critic, the first English champion
of the French Symbolist poets.
Symons’s schooling was irregular, but,
determined to be a writer, he soon found a
place in the London literary journalism of
the 1890s. He joined the Rhymers’ Club (a
group of poets including William Butler
Yeats and Ernest Dowson), contributed to The
Yellow Book, and became editor of a new
magazine, The Savoy (1896), with Aubrey
Beardsley as art editor. Symons was well
versed in European literature and knew the
French writers Paul Verlaine, Stéphane
Mallarmé, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. He
expanded his pioneering essay “The Decadent
Movement in Literature” (Harper’s, November
1893) into a book, The Symbolist Movement in
Literature (1899), which influenced both
Yeats and T.S. Eliot; in it he characterized
Symbolist literature as suggesting or
evoking the “unseen reality apprehended by
the consciousness.” Symons’s criticism
constitutes an ambitious development of
Walter Pater’s model of the “aesthetic
critic.”
Symons’s best poetry is strongly fin de
siècle in feeling. Days and Nights (1889),
Silhouettes (1892), and London Nights (1895)
contain admirable impressionist lyrics,
sensitive to the complex moods of urban
life. “Episode of a Night of May” is an
exquisitely ironic fixing of the detail of
modern social experience; “Maquillage” is
one of the best statements of the Aesthetic
cult of artifice; Yeats described “La
Mélinite: Moulin Rouge” as “one of the most
perfect lyrics of our time.” Symons suffered
a serious attack of mental illness in
1908–10. He recovered to produce, over the
next 20 years, a stream of travel writing,
criticism, and translation, though he never
quite regained the intense originality of
his early period.
