Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement

Art movement

An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within a number of years...

 of French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

, Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n and Belgian

Belgium

Belgium , officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO.Belgium is also a member of, or affiliated to, many...

 origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...

(The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

. The works of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes

Trope (literature)

A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...

 and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

 and Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

 during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

 of literature and of art.

Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

.http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/Rom_Links.htm

Etymology

The term "symbolism" is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek συμβόλων symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon, was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance.

Precursors and origins

Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

 and realism

Realism (arts)

Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...

, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality

Spirituality

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...

, the imagination

Imagination

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...

, and dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...

, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists; for Huysmans, this change represented his increasing interest in religion and spirituality. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the decadents

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

 represent naturalist interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case this was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the world-weariness characteristic of the fin de siècle

Fin de siècle

Fin de siècle is French for "end of the century". The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning...

period.

The symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French literary style that immediately preceded it. While being influenced by hermeticism

Hermeticism

Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus...

, allowing freer versification

Free verse

Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...

, and rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained Parnassianism's love of word play

Word play

Word play or wordplay is a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement...

 and concern for the musical qualities of verse. The symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier

Théophile Gautier

Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....

's motto of "art for art's sake

Art for art's sake

"Art for art's sake" is the usual English rendering of a French slogan, from the early 19th century, l'art pour l'art, and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function...

", and retained — and modified — Parnassianism's mood of ironic detachment. Many symbolist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

 and Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

, published early works in Le Parnasse contemporain

Le Parnasse contemporain

Le Parnasse contemporain is composed of three volumes of poetry collections, published in 1866, 1871 and 1876 by the editor Alphonse Lemerre, which included a hundred French poets, such as Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Heredia, Gautier, Catulle Mendès, Baudelaire, Sully Prudhomme,...

, the poetry anthologies that gave Parnassianism its name. But Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

 publicly mocked prominent Parnassians, and published scatological parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée

François Coppée

François Edouard Joachim Coppée was a French poet and novelist.-Biography:He was born in Paris to a civil servant. After attending the Lycée Saint-Louis he became a clerk in the ministry of war, and won public favour as a poet of the Parnassian school. His first printed verses date from 1864...

 — misattributed to Coppée himself — in L'Album zutique.

The Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths which could only be described indirectly. Thus, they wrote in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

 published the Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolist Manifesto

The Symbolist Manifesto is a French work published in 1886 in France by the Greek poet and essayist Jean Moréas. It defines and characterizes Symbolism as a style whose "goal was not the ideal, but whose sole purpose was to express itself for the sake of being expressed." It names Charles...

 ("Le Symbolisme") in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886 (see 1886 in poetry

1886 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Frederick James Furnivall founds the Shelley Society...

). Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description", and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal":

Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales.

(In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.)

Techniques

The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were sympathetic with the trend toward free verse

Free verse

Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...

, as evident by the poems of Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...

 and Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

. Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather than primarily to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. T.S. Eliot was one of these poets, although it has also been said that 'Imagism' was the style to which both Pound and Eliot subscribed (see Pound's Des Imagistes). Synesthesia

Synesthesia

Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...

 was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences, which also mentions forêts de symboles — forests of symbols —

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

(There are perfumes that are fresh like children's flesh,
sweet like oboes, green like meadows
— And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

having the expansiveness of infinite things,
like amber, musc, benzoin, and incense,
which sing of the raptures of the soul and senses.)

and Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

's poem Voyelles:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles. . .

(A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels. . .)

— both poets seek to identify one sense experience with another. The earlier Romanticism of poetry used symbol

Symbol

A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...

s, but these symbols were unique and privileged objects. The symbolists were more extreme, investing all things, even vowels and perfumes, with potential symbolic value. "The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much as a superior network of associations." Symbolist symbols are not allegories

Allegory

Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

, intended to represent; they are instead intended to evoke

Evocation

Evocation is the act of calling or summoning a spirit, demon, god or other supernatural agent, in the Western mystery tradition. Comparable practices exist in many religions and magical traditions.-Evocation in the Western mystery tradition:...

 particular states of mind. The nominal subject of Mallarmé's "Le cygne" ("The Swan

Swan

Swans, genus Cygnus, are birds of the family Anatidae, which also includes geese and ducks. Swans are grouped with the closely related geese in the subfamily Anserinae where they form the tribe Cygnini. Sometimes, they are considered a distinct subfamily, Cygninae...

") is of a swan trapped in a frozen lake. Significantly, in French, cygne is a homophone of signe, a sign. The overall effect is of overwhelming whiteness; and the presentation of the narrative elements of the description is quite indirect:

Le vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd’hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui!
Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre...

("The virgin, lively, and beautiful today - will it tear for us this hard forgotten lake that lurks beneath the frost, the transparent glacier of flights not taken with a blow from a drunken wing? A swan of long ago remembers that it is he, magnificent but without hope, who breaks free...")

Paul Verlaine and the poètes maudits

Of the several attempts at defining the essence of symbolism, perhaps none was more influential than Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

's 1884 publication of a series of essays on Tristan Corbière

Tristan Corbière

Tristan Corbière , born Édouard-Joachim Corbière, was a French poet born in Coat-Congar, Ploujean in Brittany, where he lived most of his life and where he died....

, Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...

, Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore was a French poet.She was born in Douai. Following the French Revolution, her family emigrated to Guadeloupe. In 1817 she married her second husband, the actor Prosper Lanchantin-Valmore....

, Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval

Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...

, and "Pauvre Lelian" ("Poor Lelian", an anagram of Paul Verlaine's own name), each of whom Verlaine numbered among the poètes maudits

Poète maudit

A poète maudit is a poet living a life outside or against society. Abuse of drugs and alcohol, insanity, crime, violence, and in general any societal sin, often resulting in an early death are typical elements of the biography of a poète maudit....

, "accursed poets."

Verlaine argued that in their individual and very different ways, each of these hitherto neglected poets found genius

Genius

Genius is something or someone embodying exceptional intellectual ability, creativity, or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of unprecedented insight....

 a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned to avoid hermeticism

Hermeticism

Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus...

 and idiosyncratic writing styles. They were also portrayed as at odds with society, having tragic lives, and often given to self-destructive tendencies. These traits were not hindrances but consequences of their literary gifts. Verlaine's concept of the poète maudit in turn borrows from Baudelaire, who opened his collection Les fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal

Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...

with the poem Bénédiction

Benediction

A benediction is a short invocation for divine help, blessing and guidance, usually at the end of worship service.-Judaism:...

, which describes a poet whose internal serenity remains undisturbed by the contempt of the people surrounding him.

In this conception of genius and the role of the poet, Verlaine referred indirectly to the aesthetics

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 of Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...

, the philosopher of pessimism

Pessimism

Pessimism, from the Latin word pessimus , is a state of mind in which one perceives life negatively. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?"...

, who maintained that the purpose of art was to provide a temporary refuge from the world of strife of the will

Will (philosophy)

Will, in philosophical discussions, consonant with a common English usage, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally performed. Actions made according to a person's will are called "willing" or "voluntary" and sometimes pejoratively "willful"...

.

Philosophy

Schopenhauer's aesthetics

Schopenhauer's aesthetics

Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics result from his doctrine of the primacy of the Will as the thing in itself, the ground of life and all being; and from his judgment that the Will is evil. Schopenhauer held that art offers a way for people to temporarily escape the suffering that results from willing...

 represented shared concerns with the symbolist programme; they both tended to consider Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and Will

Will (philosophy)

Will, in philosophical discussions, consonant with a common English usage, refers to a property of the mind, and an attribute of acts intentionally performed. Actions made according to a person's will are called "willing" or "voluntary" and sometimes pejoratively "willful"...

. As a result of this desire for an artistic refuge, the symbolists used characteristic themes of mysticism

Mysticism

Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

 and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality

Death

Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....

, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality

Human sexuality

Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...

, which Albert Samain

Albert Samain

Albert Victor Samain was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school.Born in Lille, his family were Flemish and had long lived in the town or its suburbs. At the time of the poet's birth, his father, Jean-Baptiste Samain, and his mother, Elisa-Henriette Mouquet, conducted a business in "wines...

 termed a "fruit of death upon the tree of life." Mallarmé's poem Les fenêtres expresses all of these themes clearly. A dying man in a hospital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of his physical surroundings, turns toward his window but then turns away in disgust from

. . . l'homme à l'âme dure
Vautré dans le bonheur, où ses seuls appétits
Mangent, et qui s'entête à chercher cette ordure
Pour l'offrir à la femme allaitant ses petits,

". . . the hard-souled man,
Wallowing in happiness, where only his appetites
Feed, and who insists on seeking out this filth
To offer to the wife suckling his children,"

and in contrast, he "turns his back on life" (tourne l’épaule à la vie) and he exclaims:

Je me mire et me vois ange! Et je meurs, et j'aime
— Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticité —
A renaître, portant mon rêve en diadème,
Au ciel antérieur où fleurit la Beauté!

"I marvel at myself, I seem an angel! and I die, and I love
--- Whether the glass might be art, or mysticism ---
To be reborn, bearing my dream as a diadem,
Under that former sky where Beauty once flourished!"

Symbolists and decadents

The symbolist style has frequently been confused with decadence

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

. Several young writers were derisively referred to by the press as "decadent" during the mid 1880s. A few of these writers embraced the term while most avoided it.

Jean Moréas' manifesto

Symbolist Manifesto

The Symbolist Manifesto is a French work published in 1886 in France by the Greek poet and essayist Jean Moréas. It defines and characterizes Symbolism as a style whose "goal was not the ideal, but whose sole purpose was to express itself for the sake of being expressed." It names Charles...

 was largely a response to this polemic. By the late 1880s, the terms "symbolism" and "decadence" were understood to be almost synonymous. Though the aesthetics of the styles can be considered similar in some ways, the two remain distinct. The symbolists were those artists who emphasized dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated précieux, ornamented, or hermetic styles, and morbid subject matters. The subject of the decadence of the Roman Empire was a frequent source of literary images and appears in the works of many poets of the period, regardless of which name they chose for their style, as in Verlaine's "Langueur":

Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la Décadence,
Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs
En composant des acrostiches indolents
D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse.

("I am the Empire at the end of the decadence, who watches the large, white barbarians passing, while composing lazy acrostic poems in a gilded style in which the languor of the sun dances.")

Periodical literature

A number of important literary publications were founded by symbolists or became associated with the style. The first was La Vogue initiated in April 1886. In October of that same year, Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

, Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...

, and Paul Adam began the periodical Le Symboliste. One of the most important symbolist journals was Le Mercure de France, edited by Alfred Vallette

Alfred Vallette

Alfred Vallette was a French man of letters.He founded and edited the Le Mercure de France, a Symbolist review publication. His wife, Rachilde, helped him to edit it....

, which succeeded La Pléiade; founded in 1890, this periodical endured until 1965. Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs

Pierre Louÿs was a French poet and writer, most renowned for lesbian and classical themes in some of his writings. He is known as a writer who "expressed pagan sensuality with stylistic perfection."-Life:...

 initiated La conque, a periodical whose symbolist influences were alluded to by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 in his story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Other symbolist literary magazines included La Revue blanche, La Revue wagnérienne, La Plume

La Plume

La Plume was a French literary and artistic review. It was set up in 1889 by Léon Deschamps, who edited it for ten years and was succeeded as editor by Karl Boès from 1899 to 1914. Its offices were at number 31 rue Bonaparte...

and La Wallonie.

Rémy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...

 and Félix Fénéon

Félix Fénéon

Félix Fénéon was a Parisian anarchist and art critic during the late 19th century...

 were literary critics

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 associated with symbolism. The symbolist and decadent literary styles were satirized

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

 by a book of poetry, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette

Adoré Floupette

Adoré Floupette is the collective pseudonym of French authors Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire used for their 1885 literary spoof titled Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette, a collection of poems satirising French symbolism and the Decadent movement....

, published in 1885 by Henri Beauclair

Henri Beauclair

Henri Eugène Amédée Beauclair was a French poet, novelist, and journalist. He was the chief editor of the daily newspaper Le Petit Journal from 1906 to 1914...

 and Gabriel Vicaire.

Russians

Primary influences on the style of Russian Symbolism

Russian Symbolism

Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...

 were the irrationalistic and mystical

Mysticism

Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...

 poetry and philosophy of Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev is generally considered the last of three great Romantic poets of Russia, following Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.- Life :...

 and Vladimir Solovyov

Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, poet, pamphleteer, literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century...

, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the operas of Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal...

 and Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...

, French symbolist and decadent poets (such as Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...

, Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine

Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...

 and Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

), and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of prose drama" and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre...

.

The style was largely inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky

Nikolai Minsky

Nikolai Minsky and Nikolai Maksimovich Minsky are pseudonyms of Nikolai Maksimovich Vilenkin , a mystical writer and poet of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry....

's article The Ancient Debate (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, , 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris) was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida...

's book On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism

Individualism

Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that stresses "the moral worth of the individual". Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance while opposing most external interference upon one's own...

 and the act of creation. Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, , 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris) was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida...

 was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on god-men, among whom he counted Christ

Christ

Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...

, Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc

Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...

, Dante

DANTE

Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that plans, builds and operates the international networks that interconnect the various national research and education networks in Europe and surrounding regions...

, Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

, Napoleon, and (later) Hitler. His wife, Zinaida Gippius

Zinaida Gippius

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia"....

, also a major poet of early symbolism, opened a salon in St Petersburg, which came to be known as the "headquarters of Russian decadence

Decadence

Decadence can refer to a personal trait, or to the state of a society . Used to describe a person's lifestyle. Concise Oxford Dictionary: "a luxurious self-indulgence"...

."

Visual arts

Symbolism in literature is distinct from symbolism in art although the two were similar in many respects. In painting, symbolism was a continuation of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

, which included such artists as Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...

, Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Khnopff

Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff as a Belgian symbolist painter.- Youth and Training :...

 and John Henry Fuseli and it was even more similar to the self-consciously morbid and private decadent movement

Decadent movement

The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...

.

There were several rather dissimilar groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, which included Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau

Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...

, Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...

, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , also known as M. K. Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian painter and composer. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. During his short life he composed about 250 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings...

, Odilon Redon

Odilon Redon

Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...

, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...

, Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour

Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.-Biography:...

, Gaston Bussière (painter), Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...

, Félicien Rops

Félicien Rops

Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...

, and Jan Toorop

Jan Toorop

Jean Theodoor Toorop , better known as Jan Toorop, was an Indo painter, whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.-Biography:...

. Symbolism in painting was even more widespread geographically than symbolism in poetry, affecting Mikhail Vrubel

Mikhail Vrubel

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel is usually regarded amongst the Russian painters of the Symbolist movement. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought in Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.-Early...

, Nicholas Roerich

Nicholas Roerich

Nicholas Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure. A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings and about 30 literary works...

, Victor Borisov-Musatov

Victor Borisov-Musatov

Victor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov , was a Russian painter, prominent for his unique Post-Impressionistic style that mixed Symbolism, pure decorative style and realism. Together with Mikhail Vrubel he is often referred as the creator of Russian Symbolism style.-Biography:Victor Musatov was born...

, Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan

Martiros Saryan was an Armenian painter.He was born into an Armenian family in Nor Nakhijevan . In 1895, aged 15, he completed the Nakhichevan school and from 1897 to 1904 studied at the Moscow School of Arts, including in the workshops of Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin...

, Mikhail Nesterov

Mikhail Nesterov

Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov was a major representative of religious Symbolism in Russian art. He was a pupil of Pavel Tchistyakov at the Imperial Academy of Arts, but later allied himself with the group of artists known as the Peredvizhniki...

, Leon Bakst

Léon Bakst

Léon Samoilovitch Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume designer. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes...

, Elena Gorokhova

Elena Gorokhova

Elena Konstantinovna Gorokhova - Soviet Russian painter, living and working in Saint Petersburg, regarded as one of representatives of the Leningrad School of Painting.- Biography :...

 in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo de Rivera was a Mexican painter, born in Coyoacán, and perhaps best known for her self-portraits....

 in Mexico, Elihu Vedder

Elihu Vedder

Elihu Vedder was an American symbolist painter, book illustrator, and poet, born in New York City....

, Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo

Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish-Mexican, para-surrealist painter and anarchist. She was born María de los Remedios Varo Uranga in Anglès, Girona, Spain in 1908. During the Spanish Civil War she fled to Paris where she was greatly influenced by the surrealist movement...

, Morris Graves

Morris Graves

Morris Cole Graves was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves was also a mystic.-Early years:...

 and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin , known as Auguste Rodin , was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...

 is sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.

The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography

Iconography

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...

 but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

 style and Les Nabis

Les Nabis

Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian in Paris in the...

.

Music

Symbolism had some influence on music as well. Many symbolist writers and critics were early enthusiasts of the music of Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

, a fellow student of Schopenhauer.

The symbolist aesthetic affected the works of Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

. His choices of libretti

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

, texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the symbolist canon. Compositions such as his settings of Cinq poèmes de Baudelaire, various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 Pelléas et Mélisande

Pelléas et Mélisande (opera)

Pelléas et Mélisande is an opera in five acts with music by Claude Debussy. The French libretto was adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande...

with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...

, and his unfinished sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, The Devil in the Belfry

The Devil in the Belfry

"The Devil in the Belfry" is a satirical short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in 1839.-Plot summary:In an isolated town called Vondervotteimittis , the punctilious inhabitants seem to be concerned with nothing but clocks and cabbage...

and The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 for the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque...

, all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by symbolist themes and tastes. His best known work, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune

Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune , commonly known by its English title Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration...

, was inspired by Mallarmé's poem, L'après-midi d'un faune

Afternoon of a Faun (poem)

L'après-midi d'un faune is a poem by the French author Stéphane Mallarmé. It is his best-known work and a landmark in the history of symbolism in French literature...

.

The symbolist aesthetic also influenced Aleksandr Scriabin

Alexander Scriabin

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...

's compositions. Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

's Pierrot Lunaire

Pierrot Lunaire

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire' , commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 , is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg...

takes its text from German translations of the symbolist poems by Albert Giraud

Albert Giraud

Albert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...

, showing an association between German expressionism and symbolism. Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss was a leading German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is known for his operas, which include Der Rosenkavalier and Salome; his Lieder, especially his Four Last Songs; and his tone poems and orchestral works, such as Death and Transfiguration, Till...

's 1905 opera Salomé

Salome (opera)

Salome is an opera in one act by Richard Strauss to a German libretto by the composer, based on Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation of the French play Salomé by Oscar Wilde. Strauss dedicated the opera to his friend Sir Edgar Speyer....

, based on the play by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, uses a subject frequently depicted by symbolist artists.

Prose fiction

Symbolism's style of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...

' 1884 novel À rebours

À rebours

À rebours is a novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans...

(English title: Against Nature) explored many themes that became associated with the symbolist aesthetic. This novel, in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

 imitated the novel in several passages of The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July 1890 issue of this magazine...

.

Paul Adam was the most prolific and most representative author of symbolist novels. Les Demoiselles Goubert (1886), co-written with Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas

Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...

, is an important transitional work between naturalism

Naturalism (literature)

Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character...

 and symbolism. Few symbolists used this form. One exception was Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn

Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...

, who published Le Roi fou in 1896. In 1892, Georges Rodenbach

Georges Rodenbach

Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...

 wrote the short novel Bruges-la-morte

Bruges-la-Morte

Bruges-la-Morte is a short novel by the Belgian author Georges Rodenbach, first published in 1892. The title is difficult to translate but might be rendered as The Dead City of Bruges...

, set in the Flemish town of Bruges

Bruges

Bruges is the capital and largest city of the province of West Flanders in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located in the northwest of the country....

, which Rodenbach described as a dying, mediæval city of mourning and quiet contemplation: in a typically symbolist juxtaposition, the dead city contrasts with the diabolical re-awakening of sexual desire. The cynical, misanthropic, misogynistic fiction of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is sometimes considered symbolist, as well. Gabriele d'Annunzio

Gabriele D'Annunzio

Gabriele D'Annunzio or d'Annunzio was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, and dramatist...

 wrote his first novels in the symbolist manner.

Theatre

The characteristic emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies have made symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent trends. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was a French symbolist writer.-Life:Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, to a distinguished aristocratic family...

's drama Axël

Axël (drama)

Axël is a drama by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam published in 1890. It was influenced by his participation in the Paris Commune, as well as the works of Goethe and Victor Hugo. It begins in an occult castle. The Byronic hero Axël meets a Germanic princess. After an initial conflict they fall in...

(rev. ed. 1890) is a definitive symbolist play. In it, two Rosicrucian aristocrats become enamored of each other while trying to kill each other, only to agree to commit suicide mutually because nothing in life could equal their fantasies. From this play, Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...

 adopted the title Axel's Castle for his influential study of the symbolist literary aftermath.

Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...

, also a symbolist playwright, wrote The Blind

The Blind

The Blind , also known as The Sightless, is a play that was written in 1890 by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. It is an intense one-act play, which was one of the pieces mentioned in a list of Maeterlinck’s most characteristic plays. This list was highlighted in the speech given to...

(1890), The Intruder (1890), Interior (1891), Pelléas and Mélisande

Pelléas et Mélisande (play)

Pelléas and Mélisande is a Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the forbidden, doomed love of the title characters. It was first performed in 1893....

(1892), and The Blue Bird (1908).

The later works of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

 have been identified as being much influenced by symbolist pessimism. Both Constantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold

Vsevolod Meyerhold

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a great Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre.-Early...

 experimented with symbolist modes of staging in their theatrical endeavors.

Drama by symbolist authors formed an important part of the repertoire of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre

Théâtre de l'Œuvre

The Théâtre de l'Œuvre is a Paris theatre, located atop cité Monthiers, at 55 rue de Clichy in the 9° arrondissement in Paris, France. It is best known as the theatre where Alfred Jarry’s nihilistic farce Ubu Roi premiered in 1896....

and the Théâtre des Arts

Théâtre Hébertot

Théâtre Hébertot is a theatre at 78, boulevard des Batignolles, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris, France. The theatre, completed in 1838 and opening as the Théâtre des Batignolles, was later renamed Théâtre des Arts in 1907...

.

Effect

Among English-speaking artists, the closest counterpart to symbolism was aestheticism

Aestheticism

Aestheticism was a 19th century European art movement that emphasized aesthetic values more than socio-political themes for literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design...

. The pre-Raphaelites were contemporaries of the earlier symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

, and its traces can be detected in the work of many modernist artists, including T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

, Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

, Conrad Aiken

Conrad Aiken

Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...

, Hart Crane

Hart Crane

-Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...

, and William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

 in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío

Rubén Darío

Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...

 in Hispanic literature. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....

 have strong affinities with symbolism.

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...

's 1931 study Axel's Castle focuses on the continuity with symbolism and several important writers of the early twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry

Paul Valéry

Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...

, Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...

, James Joyce

James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

, and Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...

. Wilson concluded that the symbolists represented a dreaming retreat into

things that are dying—the whole belle-lettristic

Belles-lettres

Belles-lettres or belles lettres is a term that is used to describe a category of writing. A writer of belles-lettres is a belletrist. However, the boundaries of that category vary in different usages....

 tradition of Renaissance culture perhaps, compelled to specialize more and more, more and more driven in on itself, as industrialism and democratic education have come to press it closer and closer.

After the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism had a major effect on Russian poetry

Russian literature

Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...

 even as it became less popular in France. Russian symbolism

Russian Symbolism

Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...

, steeped in the Eastern Orthodoxy and the religious doctrines of Vladimir Solovyov

Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)

Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, poet, pamphleteer, literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century...

, had little in common with the French style of the same name. It began the careers of several major poets such as Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...

, Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.-Biography:...

, and Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from...

. Bely's novel Petersburg (1912) is considered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.

In Romania

Romania

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...

, symbolists directly influenced by French poetry first gained influence during the 1880s, when Alexandru Macedonski

Alexandru Macedonski

Alexandru Macedonski was a Wallachian-born Romanian poet, novelist, dramatist and literary critic, known especially for having promoted French Symbolism in his native country, and for leading the Romanian Symbolist movement during its early decades...

 reunited a group of young poets associated with his magazine Literatorul. Polemicizing with the established Junimea

Junimea

Junimea was a Romanian literary society founded in Iaşi in 1863, through the initiative of several foreign-educated personalities led by Titu Maiorescu, Petre P. Carp, Vasile Pogor, Theodor Rosetti and Iacob Negruzzi...

and overshadowed by the influence of Mihai Eminescu

Mihai Eminescu

Mihai Eminescu was a Romantic poet, novelist and journalist, often regarded as the most famous and influential Romanian poet. Eminescu was an active member of the Junimea literary society and he worked as an editor for the newspaper Timpul , the official newspaper of the Conservative Party...

, Romanian symbolism

Symbolist movement in Romania

The Symbolist movement in Romania, active during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marked the development of Romanian culture in both literature and visual arts...

 was recovered as an inspiration during and after the 1910s, when it was exampled by the works of Tudor Arghezi

Tudor Arghezi

Tudor Arghezi was a Romanian writer, best known for his contribution to poetry and children's literature. Born Ion N. Theodorescu in Bucharest , he explained that his pen name was related to Argesis, the Latin name for the Argeş River.-Early life:Along with Mihai Eminescu, Mateiu Caragiale, and...

, Ion Minulescu

Ion Minulescu

Ion Minulescu was a Romanian avant-garde poet, novelist, short story writer, journalist, literary critic, and playwright. Often publishing his works under the pseudonyms I. M. Nirvan and Koh-i-Noor , he journeyed to Paris, where he was heavily influenced by the growing Symbolist movement and...

, George Bacovia

George Bacovia

George Bacovia was a Romanian symbolist poet. While he initially belonged to the local Symbolist movement, his poetry came to be seen as a precursor of Romanian Modernism and eventually established him in critical esteem alongside Tudor Arghezi, Lucian Blaga and Ion Barbu as one of the most...

, Mateiu Caragiale

Mateiu Caragiale

Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...

, Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...

 and Tudor Vianu

Tudor Vianu

Tudor Vianu was a Romanian literary critic, art critic, poet, philosopher, academic, and translator. Known for his left-wing and anti-fascist convictions, he had a major role on the reception and development of Modernism in Romanian literature and art...

, and praised by the modernist

Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...

 magazine Sburătorul

Sburatorul

Sburătorul was a Romanian modernist literary magazine and literary society, established in Bucharest in April 1919. Led by Eugen Lovinescu, the circle was instrumental in developing new trends and styles in Romanian literature, ranging from a new wave of Romanian Symbolism to an urban-themed...

.

The symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

 and surrealism

Surrealism

Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

 in painting, two movements which descend directly from symbolism proper. The harlequin

Harlequin

Harlequin or Arlecchino in Italian, Arlequin in French, and Arlequín in Spanish is the most popularly known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte and its descendant, the Harlequinade.-Origins:...

s, paupers, and clowns of Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...

's "Blue Period

Blue Period

The Blue Period is a term used to define to the works produced by Spanish painter Pablo Picasso between 1901 and 1904, when he painted essentially monochromatic paintings in shades of blue and blue-green, only occasionally warmed by other colors...

" show the influence of symbolism, and especially of Puvis de Chavannes. In Belgium, symbolism became so popular that it came to be thought of as a national style: the static strangeness of painters like René Magritte

René Magritte

René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...

 can be considered as a direct continuation of symbolism. The work of some symbolist visual artists, such as Jan Toorop

Jan Toorop

Jean Theodoor Toorop , better known as Jan Toorop, was an Indo painter, whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.-Biography:...

, directly effected the curvilinear forms of art nouveau

Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau is an international philosophy and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that were most popular during 1890–1910. The name "Art Nouveau" is French for "new art"...

.

Many early motion pictures also employ symbolist visual imagery and themes in their staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German expressionism owe a great deal to symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the cinema of D. W. Griffith

D. W. Griffith

David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the controversial and groundbreaking 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance .Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera...

, and the silent movie

Silent Movie

Silent Movie is a 1976 satirical comedy film co-written, directed by, and starring Mel Brooks, and released by 20th Century Fox on June 17, 1976...

 "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara

Theda Bara

Theda Bara , born Theodosia Burr Goodman, was an American silent film actress – one of the most popular of her era, and one of cinema's earliest sex symbols. Her femme fatale roles earned her the nickname "The Vamp" . The term "vamp" soon became a popular slang term for a sexually predatory woman...

, both show the continuing influence of symbolism, as do the Babylon

Babylon

Babylon was an Akkadian city-state of ancient Mesopotamia, the remains of which are found in present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad...

ian scenes from Griffith's Intolerance

Intolerance (film)

Intolerance is a 1916 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith and is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Silent Era. The three-and-a-half hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines each separated by several centuries: A contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption; a...

. Symbolist imagery lived on longest in horror film

Horror film

Horror films seek to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by playing on the audience's most primal fears. They often feature scenes that startle the viewer through the means of macabre and the supernatural, thus frequently overlapping with the fantasy and science fiction genres...

: as late as 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jr. was a Danish film director. He is regarded by many critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest directors in cinema.-Life:Dreyer was born illegitimate in Copenhagen, Denmark...

's Vampyr showed the obvious influence of symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble tableau vivant re-creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...

.

Symbolists

Precursors

• William Blake
  William Blake
  William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...
  
   (1757–1827) English writer (Songs of Innocence)
• Caspar David Friedrich
  Caspar David Friedrich
  Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning...
  
   (1774–1840) German painter (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
  Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an oil painting composed in 1818 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It currently resides in the Kunsthalle Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany.-Description:...
  
  )
• Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) Russian poet and writer (Eugene Onegin
  Eugene Onegin
  Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...
  
  )
• Gérard de Nerval
  Gérard de Nerval
  Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the most essentially Romantic French poets.- Biography :...
  
   (1808–55) French poet
• Edgar Allan Poe
  Edgar Allan Poe
  Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
  
   (1809–49) American poet and writer (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
  The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus...
  
  )
• Mikhail Lermontov
  Mikhail Lermontov
  Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov , a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837. Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature alongside Pushkin and the greatest...
  
   (1814-1841) Russian poet and writer (A Hero of Our Time
  A Hero of Our Time
  A Hero of Our Time is a novel by Mikhail Lermontov, written in 1839 and revised in 1841. It is an example of the superfluous man novel, noted for its compelling Byronic hero Pechorin and for the beautiful descriptions of the Caucasus...
  
  )
• Charles Baudelaire
  Charles Baudelaire
  Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
  
   (1821–67) French poet (Les Fleurs du mal
  Les Fleurs du mal
  Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 , it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements...
  
  )
• Gustave Flaubert
  Gustave Flaubert
  Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
  
   (1821–1880) French writer (Madame Bovary
  Madame Bovary
  Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert's first published novel and is considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor's wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life...
  
  )
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  Dante Gabriel Rossetti
  Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...
  
   (1828–82) English painter (Beata Beatrix
  Beata Beatrix
  Beata Beatrix is an oil on canvas painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, completed in 1872. It depicts Beatrice Portinari from Dante Alighieri's poem La Vita Nuova at the moment of her death. Rossetti modeled Beatrice after his deceased wife and frequent model Elizabeth Siddal....
  
  )
• Christina Rossetti
  Christina Rossetti
  Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems...
  
   (1830–1894) English poet

Authors

(listed by year of birth)

• Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
  Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
  Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was a French symbolist writer.-Life:Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, to a distinguished aristocratic family...
  
   (1838–89) French
• Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé
  Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
  
   (1842–98) French
• Paul Verlaine
  Paul Verlaine
  Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
  
   (1844–96) French
• Arthur Rimbaud
  Arthur Rimbaud
  Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
  
   (1854–91) French
• Albert Samain
  Albert Samain
  Albert Victor Samain was a French poet and writer of the Symbolist school.Born in Lille, his family were Flemish and had long lived in the town or its suburbs. At the time of the poet's birth, his father, Jean-Baptiste Samain, and his mother, Elisa-Henriette Mouquet, conducted a business in "wines...
  
   (1858–1900) French
• Rémy de Gourmont
  Remy de Gourmont
  Remy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
  
   (1858–1915) French
• Gustave Kahn
  Gustave Kahn
  Gustave Kahn was a French Symbolist poet and art critic.Kahn was born in Metz.He claimed to have invented the term vers libre, or free verse; he was in any case one of the first European exponents of the form. His principal publications include Les Palais nomades, 1887, Domaine de fée, 1895, and...
  
   (1859–1936) French
• Jules Laforgue
  Jules Laforgue
  Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
  
   (1860–87) French
• Rachilde
  Rachilde
  Rachilde was the nom de plume of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, a French author who was born February 11, 1860 in Périgueux, Périgord, Dordogne, Aquitaine, France during the Second French Empire and died on April 4, 1953....
  
   (1860–1953) French
• Paul Adam (1862–1920) French
• Francis Viélé-Griffin
  Francis Viélé-Griffin
  Francis Vielé-Griffin , was a French symbolist poet. He was born at Norfolk, Virginia, USA and was the son of Egbert Ludovicus Viele.Vielé-Griffin was educated in France and divided his time between Paris and Touraine...
  
   (1863–1937) French
• Henri de Régnier
  Henri de Régnier
  Henri François Joseph de Régnier was a French symbolist poet, considered one of the most important of France during the early 20th century....
  
   (1864–1936) French
• Albert Aurier
  Albert Aurier
  G. Albert Aurier was a poet, art critic and painter, devoted to Symbolism.Son of a notary born in Châteauroux, Indre, Aurier went to Paris in 1883 to study law, but soon his attention was drawn to art and literature, and he began to contribute to Symolist periodicals...
  
   (1865–1892) French
• Paul Valéry
  Paul Valéry
  Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
  
   (1871–1945) French
• Paul Fort
  Paul Fort
  Paul Fort was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. At the age of 18, reacting against the Naturalistic theatre, Fort founded the Théâtre d’Art...
  
   (1872–1960) French
• Alfred Jarry
  Alfred Jarry
  Alfred Jarry was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother's side....
  
   (1873–1907) French

• Innokenty Annensky
  Innokenty Annensky
  Innokentiy Fyodorovich Annensky was a poet, critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism...
  
   (1855–1909) Russian
• Fyodor Sologub
  Fyodor Sologub
  Fyodor Sologub was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayist. He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.-Early life:...
  
   (1863–1927) Russian
• Dmitry Merezhkovsky
  Dmitry Merezhkovsky
  Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, , 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris) was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida...
  
   (1865–1941) Russian
• Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) Russian
• Konstantin Bal'mont (1867—1942) Russian
• Zinaida Gippius
  Zinaida Gippius
  Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia"....
  
   (1869–1945) Russian
• Valery Bryusov
  Valery Bryusov
  Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...
  
   (1873–1924) Russian
• Maximilian Voloshin
  Maximilian Voloshin
  Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
  
   (1877–1932) Russian
• Alexander Blok
  Alexander Blok
  Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...
  
   (1880–1921) Russian
• Andrei Bely
  Andrei Bely
  Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.-Biography:...
  
   (1880–1934) Russian
• Georges Rodenbach
  Georges Rodenbach
  Georges Raymond Constantin Rodenbach was a Belgian Symbolist poet and novelist.- Biography :Georges Rodenbach was born in Tournai to a French mother and a German father from the Rhineland . He went to school in Ghent at the prestigious Sint-Barbaracollege, where he became friends with the poet...
  
   (1855–98) Belgian
• Emile Verhaeren
  Emile Verhaeren
  Emile Verhaeren was a Belgian poet who wrote in the French language, and one of the chief founders of the school of Symbolism....
  
   (1855–1916) Belgian
• Albert Giraud
  Albert Giraud
  Albert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...
  
   (1860–1929) Belgian
• Maurice Maeterlinck
  Maurice Maeterlinck
  Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck, also called Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who wrote in French. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. The main themes in his work are death and the meaning of life...
  
   (1862–1949) Belgian
• Albert Mockel
  Albert Mockel
  Albert Mockel was a Belgian Symbolist poet. Born in Ougrée, he was the editor of La Wallonie, an influential journal of Belgian Symbolism...
  
   (1866–1945) Belgian

• Antoni Lange
  Antoni Lange
  Antoni Lange was a Polish poet, philosopher, polyglot , writer, novelist, science-writer, reporter and translator. A representative of Polish Parnassianism and symbolism, he is also regarded as belonging to the Decadent movement...
  
   (1861–1929) Polish
• Tadeusz Miciński
  Tadeusz Micinski
  Tadeusz Micinski was an influential Polish poet, gnostic and playwright, and was a forerunner of Expressionism and Surrealism. He is one of the writers of the Young Poland period . His writings are strong influenced by Dark Romanticism and Romantic gothic fiction...
  
   (1873–1918) Polish
• Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski (1876–1901) Polish
• Jean Moréas
  Jean Moréas
  Jean Moréas , was a Greek poet, essayist, and art critic, who wrote mostly in the French language but also in Greek during his youth.-Background:...
  
   (1856–1910) Greek
• João da Cruz e Sousa
  João da Cruz e Sousa
  João da Cruz e Sousa was a symbolist poet from Santa Catarina, Brazil. A son of freed slaves, he was one of the great Afro-Brazilian writers. He published his first poem in 1877...
  
   (1861–1898) Brazilian
• Stuart Merrill
  Stuart Merrill
  Stuart Fitzrandolph Merrill was an American poet, born in Hempstead, New York, who wrote mostly in the French language. He belonged to the Symbolist school. His principal books of poetry were Les Gammes . Les Fastes , and Petits Poèmes d'Automne .-Life:Merrill was the product of a conservative,...
  
   (1863–1915) American
• Camilo Pessanha
  Camilo Pessanha
  Camilo Pessanha was a Portuguese symbolist poet.-Early years:Camilo de Almeida Pessanha was born the illegitimate son of Francisco António de Almeida Pessanha, an aristocratic law student, and Maria do Espírito Santo Duarte Nunes Pereira, his housekeeper, on September 7, 1867, at 11.00 p.m., in Sé...
  
   (1867–1926) Portuguese
• Otokar Březina
  Otokar Brezina
  Otakar or Otakar Březina ; pen name of Václav Jebavý.; was a Czech poet and essayist, considered the greatest of Czech Symbolists.-Biography :...
  
   (1868–1929) Czech
• Jurgis Baltrušaitis
  Jurgis Baltrušaitis
  Jurgis Baltrušaitis was a Lithuanian Symbolist poet and translator, who wrote his works in Lithuanian and Russian. In addition to his important contributions to Lithuanian literature, he was noted as a political activist and diplomat...
  
   (1873–1944) Lithuanian
• Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
  Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis
  Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis , also known as M. K. Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian painter and composer. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. During his short life he composed about 250 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings...
  
   (1875–1911) Lithuanian
• Renée Vivien
  Renée Vivien
  Renée Vivien, born Pauline Mary Tarn was a British poet who wrote in the French language. She took to heart all the mannerisms of Symbolism, as one of the last poets to claim allegiance to the school...
  
   (1877–1909) English
• Josip Murn Aleksandrov
  Josip Murn Aleksandrov
  Josip Murn, also known under the pseudonym Aleksandrov was a Slovene symbolist poet. Together with Ivan Cankar, Oton Župančič, and Dragotin Kette, he was regarded as one of the beginners of modernism in Slovene literature...
  
   (1879–1901) Slovene
• Émile Nelligan
  Émile Nelligan
  Émile Nelligan was a francophone poet from Quebec, Canada.-Biography:Nelligan was born in Montreal on December 24, 1879 at 602, rue de La Gauchetière. He was the first son of David Nelligan, who arrived in Quebec from Dublin, Ireland at the age of 12. His mother was Émilie Amanda Hudon, from...
  
   (1879–1941) Canadian
• George Bacovia
  George Bacovia
  George Bacovia was a Romanian symbolist poet. While he initially belonged to the local Symbolist movement, his poetry came to be seen as a precursor of Romanian Modernism and eventually established him in critical esteem alongside Tudor Arghezi, Lucian Blaga and Ion Barbu as one of the most...
  
   (1881–1957) Romanian
• Mateiu Caragiale
  Mateiu Caragiale
  Mateiu Ion Caragiale was a Romanian poet and prose writer, best known for his novel Craii de Curtea-Veche, which portrays the milieu of boyar descendants before and after World War I. Caragiale's style, associated with Symbolism, the Decadent movement of the fin de siècle, and early modernism, was...
  
   (1885–1936) Romanian
• Dimcho Debelyanov
  Dimcho Debelyanov
  Dimcho Debelyanov was a Bulgarian poet and author whose death in the First World War cut off his promising literary career. Born to a prosperous family in Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria, he experienced hardship upon the death of his father in 1896, which necessitated the family moving to Plovdiv, and...
  
   (1887–1916) Bulgarian

Influence in English literature

English language authors who influenced or were influenced by symbolism include:

• George MacDonald
  George MacDonald
  George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. It was C.S...
  
   (1824–1905)
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
  Algernon Charles Swinburne
  Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...
  
   (1837–1909)
• Oscar Wilde
  Oscar Wilde
  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
  
   (1854–1900)
• Francis Thompson
  Francis Thompson
  Francis Thompson was an English poet and ascetic. After attending college, he moved to London to become a writer, but in menial work, became addicted to opium, and was a street vagrant for years. A married couple read his poetry and rescued him, publishing his first book, Poems in 1893...
  
   (1859–1907)
• William Butler Yeats
  William Butler Yeats
  William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...
  
   (1865–1939)
• Arthur Symons
  Arthur Symons
  Arthur William Symons , was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.-Life:Born in Milford Haven, Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy...
  
   (1865–1945)
• John Gray
  John Gray (poet)
  John Gray was an English poet whose works include Silverpoints, The Long Road and Park: A Fantastic Story. It has often been suggested that he was the inspiration behind Oscar Wilde's fictional Dorian Gray....
  
   (1866–1934)
• Ernest Dowson
  Ernest Dowson
  Ernest Christopher Dowson , born in Lee, London, was an English poet, novelist and writer of short stories, associated with the Decadent movement.- Biography :...
  
   (1867–1900)
• George Sterling
  George Sterling
  George Sterling was an American poet based in California who, during his time, was celebrated in Northern California as one of the greatest American poets, although he never gained much fame in the rest of the United States.-Biography:Sterling was born in Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, the...
  
   (1869–1926)
• Wallace Stevens
  Wallace Stevens
  Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...
  
   (1879–1955)

• James Elroy Flecker
  James Elroy Flecker
  James Elroy Flecker was an English poet, novelist and playwright. As a poet he was most influenced by the Parnassian poets.-Biography:...
  
   (1884-1915)
• Edith Sitwell
  Edith Sitwell
  Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic.-Background:Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping...
  
   (1887–1964)
• T. S. Eliot
  T. S. Eliot
  Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
  
   (1888–1965)
• Conrad Aiken
  Conrad Aiken
  Conrad Potter Aiken was an American novelist and poet, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play and an autobiography.-Early years:...
  
   (1889–1973)
• Clark Ashton Smith
  Clark Ashton Smith
  Clark Ashton Smith was a self-educated American poet, sculptor, painter and author of fantasy, horror and science fiction short stories. He achieved early local recognition, largely through the enthusiasm of George Sterling, for traditional verse in the vein of Swinburne...
  
   (1893–1961)
• Hart Crane
  Hart Crane
  -Career:Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings , his first volume, ratified and strengthened...
  
   (1899–1932)
• Katherine Mansfield
  Katherine Mansfield
  Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and...
  
   (1888–1923)

Symbolist visual artists

Russian

• Viktor Vasnetsov
  Viktor Vasnetsov
  Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov , 1848 — Moscow, July 23, 1926) was a Russian artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He was described as co-founder of folklorist/romantic modernism in the Russian painting and a key figure of the revivalist movement in Russian art.- Childhood ...
  
   (1848–1926)
• Mikhail Vrubel
  Mikhail Vrubel
  Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel is usually regarded amongst the Russian painters of the Symbolist movement. In reality, he deliberately stood aloof from contemporary art trends, so that the origin of his unusual manner should be sought in Late Byzantine and Early Renaissance painting.-Early...
  
   (1856–1910)
• Mikhail Nesterov
  Mikhail Nesterov
  Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov was a major representative of religious Symbolism in Russian art. He was a pupil of Pavel Tchistyakov at the Imperial Academy of Arts, but later allied himself with the group of artists known as the Peredvizhniki...
  
   (1862–1942)
• Léon Bakst
  Léon Bakst
  Léon Samoilovitch Bakst was a Russian painter and scene- and costume designer. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes...
  
   (1866–1924)
• Wassily Kandinsky
  Wassily Kandinsky
  Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
  
   (early works) (1866–1944)
• Konstantin Somov
  Konstantin Somov
  Konstantin Andreyevich Somov was a Russian artist associated with the Mir iskusstva. Born into a family of a major art historian and Hermitage Museum curator, he became interested in the 18th century art and music at an early age.Somov studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Ilya Repin from...
  
   (1869–1939)
• Alexandre Benois
  Alexandre Benois
  Alexandre Nikolayevich Benois , an influential artist, art critic, historian, preservationist, and founding member of Mir iskusstva , an art movement and magazine...
  
   (1870–1960)
• Victor Borisov-Musatov
  Victor Borisov-Musatov
  Victor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov , was a Russian painter, prominent for his unique Post-Impressionistic style that mixed Symbolism, pure decorative style and realism. Together with Mikhail Vrubel he is often referred as the creator of Russian Symbolism style.-Biography:Victor Musatov was born...
  
   (1870–1905)
• Konstantin Bogaevsky
  Konstantin Bogaevsky
  Konstantin Fyodorovich Bogaevsky was a Russian painter notable for his Symbolist landscapes.-Biography:Konstantin Bogaevsky was born in the Eastern Crimean city of Theodosia to an old Italian-German family of the Genoese extraction on...
  
   (1872–1943)
• Nicholas Roerich
  Nicholas Roerich
  Nicholas Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure. A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings and about 30 literary works...
  
   (1874–1947)
• Ivan Bilibin
  Ivan Bilibin
  Ivan Yakovlevich Bilibin was a 20th-century illustrator and stage designer who took part in the Mir iskusstva and contributed to the Ballets Russes. Throughout his career, he was inspired by Slavic folklore....
  
   (1876-1942)

French

• Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes
  Pierre Puvis de Chavannes was a French painter, who became the president and co-founder of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and whose work influenced many other artists.-Life:...
  
   (1824–1898)
• Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...
  
   (1826–1898)
• Henri Fantin-Latour
  Henri Fantin-Latour
  Henri Fantin-Latour was a French painter and lithographer best known for his flower paintings and group portraits of Parisian artists and writers.-Biography:...
  
   (1836–1904)
• Odilon Redon
  Odilon Redon
  Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...
  
   (1840–1916)
• Paul Gauguin
  Paul Gauguin
  Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...
  
    (1848–1903)
• Jan Toorop
  Jan Toorop
  Jean Theodoor Toorop , better known as Jan Toorop, was an Indo painter, whose works straddle the space between the Symbolist painters and Art Nouveau.-Biography:...
  
   (1858–1928)
• Gaston Bussière (painter) (1862-1929)
• Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer
  Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer
  Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer was a French Symbolist/Art Nouveau artist whose works include paintings, drawings, ceramics, furniture and interior design.-Biography:...
  
   (1865–1953)
• Emile Bernard
  Émile Bernard
  Émile Henri Bernard is known as a Post-Impressionist painter who had artistic friendships with Van Gogh, Gauguin and Eugene Boch, and at a later time, Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and...
  
    (1868–1941)

Belgian

• Félicien Rops
  Félicien Rops
  Félicien Rops was a Belgian artist, and printmaker in etching and aquatint.-Early life:Rops was born in Namur as the only son to Nicholas Rops and Sophie Maubile. He was educated at the University of Brussels...
  
   (1855–1898)
• Fernand Khnopff
  Fernand Khnopff
  Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff as a Belgian symbolist painter.- Youth and Training :...
  
   (1858–1921)
• Jean Delville
  Jean Delville
  Jean Delville was a Belgian symbolist painter, writer, and occultist. In 1896, he founded the Salon d’Art Idealiste, which is considered the Belgian equivalent to the Parisian Rose & Cross Salon and the Pre-Raphaelite movement in London.-Quotes:-Delville's background:During the last decades of...
  
   (1867–1953)
• Leon Spilliaert
  Leon Spilliaert
  Léon Spilliaert was a Belgian symbolist painter and graphic artist.Spilliaert was born in Ostend, the oldest of seven children of Léonard-Hubert Spilliaert, who was a perfumer, and Léonie . From childhood he displayed an interest in art and drawing. A prolific doodler and autodidact, he was...
  
   (1882–1946)

others

• George Frederic Watts
  George Frederic Watts
  George Frederic Watts, OM was a popular English Victorian painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life...
  
   (1817–1904) English
• John William Waterhouse
  John William Waterhouse
  John William Waterhouse was an English painter known for working in the Pre-Raphaelite style. He worked several decades after the breakup of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which had seen its heydey in the mid-nineteenth century, leading him to have gained the moniker of "the modern Pre-Raphaelite"...
  
   (1849–1917) English
• Arnold Böcklin
  Arnold Böcklin
  Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss symbolist painter.-Life and art:He was born at Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city...
  
   (1827–1901) Swiss
• Jacek Malczewski
  Jacek Malczewski
  Jacek Malczewski was one of the most famous painters of Polish Symbolism. In his creativity he successfully joins the predominant style of his times with motifs of Polish martyrdom.-See also:...
  
   (1854–1929) Polish
• Franz Stuck
  Franz Stuck
  Franz Stuck , Franz Ritter von Stuck after 1906, was a German symbolist/Art Nouveau painter, sculptor, engraver, and architect.-Life and career:...
  
   (1863–1928) German
• Ferdinand Hodler
  Ferdinand Hodler
  Ferdinand Hodler was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the 19th century.-Life:Hodler was born in Berne, the eldest of six children. His father, Jean Hodler, made a meager living as a carpenter; his mother, Marguerite , was from a peasant family...
  
   (1853–1918) Swiss
• Gustav Klimt
  Gustav Klimt
  Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects...
  
   (1862–1918) Austrian
• Edvard Munch
  Edvard Munch
  Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionist art. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of love, fear, death, melancholia, and anxiety.- Childhood :Edvard Munch...
  
   (1863–1944) Norwegian
• Hugo Simberg
  Hugo Simberg
  Hugo Gerhard Simberg was a Finnish symbolist painter and graphic artist.-Life:Simberg was born at Hamina in Finland, the son of Colonel Nicolai Simberg and Ebba Matilda Simberg ....
  
   (1873–1917) Finnish
• Mikalojus Čiurlionis (1875–1911) Lithuanian
• Eliseu Visconti (1866–1944) Brazilian
• Ze'ev Raban
  Ze'ev Raban
  Ze’ev Raban was a leading painter, decorative artist, and industrial designer of the Bezalel school style, and was one of the founders of the Israeli art world.-Life:...
  
   (1890–1970) Polish/Israeli

Symbolist composers

• Gabriel Fauré
  Gabriel Fauré
  Gabriel Urbain Fauré was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers...
  
   (1845–1924) French
• Charles Loeffler (1861–1935) American
• Claude Debussy
  Claude Debussy
  Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...
  
   (1862–1918) French

• Alexander Scriabin
  Alexander Scriabin
  Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...
  
   (1872–1912) Russian
• Maurice Ravel
  Maurice Ravel
  Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
  
   (1875–1937) French
• Cyril Scott
  Cyril Scott
  Cyril Meir Scott was an English composer, writer, and poet.-Biography:Scott was born in Oxton, England to a shipper and scholar of Greek and Hebrew, and Mary Scott , an amateur pianist. He showed a talent for music from an early age and was sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany to...
  
   (1879–1970) English

Symbolist philosophers

• Friedrich Nietzsche
  Friedrich Nietzsche
  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
  
   (1844-1900) German
• Vladimir Solovyov
  Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)
  Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov was a Russian philosopher, poet, pamphleteer, literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry at the end of the 19th century...
  
   (1853-1900) Russian
• Vasily Rozanov
  Vasily Rozanov
  Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov was one of the most controversial Russian writers and philosophers of the pre-revolutionary epoch. His views have been termed the "religion of procreation", as he tried to reconcile Christian teachings with ideas of healthy sex and family life and not, as his adversary...
  
   (1856-1919) Russian

• Sergei Bulgakov
  Sergei Bulgakov
  Fr. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov was a Russian Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher and economist. Until 1922 he worked in Russia; afterwards in Paris.-Early life:...
  
   (1871-1944) Russian
• Vladimir N. Beneshevich
  Vladimir N. Beneshevich
  Vladimir Nicolayevich Beneshevich was a scholar of Byzantine history and canon law, and a philologer and paleographer of the manuscripts in that sphere....
  
   (1874-1938) Russian
• Pavel Florensky
  Pavel Florensky
  Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox theologian, philosopher, mathematician, electrical engineer, inventor and Neomartyr sometimes compared by his followers to Leonardo da Vinci.-Early life:Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on January 21, 1882, into the family of a railroad...
  
   (1882-1937) Russian

Further reading

• Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. Random House, 1967
• Delvaille, Bernard, La poésie symboliste: anthologie. ISBN 2-221-50161-6
• Houston, John Porter and Houston, Mona Tobin, French Symbolist Poetry: an anthology. ISBN 0-253-20250-7
• Jullian, Philippe
  Philippe Jullian
  Philippe Jullian was a French illustrator, art historian, biographer, aesthete, novelist and dandy.Jullian was born in Bordeaux in 1922...
  
  , The Symbolists. ISBN 0-7148-1739-2
• Lehmann, A.G.
  Andrew George Lehmann
  Andrew George Lehmann, M.A., D.Phil. Emeritus Professor Buckingham University, UK was a literary critic, academic, and seminal author and essayist in the areas of the Symbolist Movement in France, and the intellectual history of European Romanticism.Born in Chile to Mary Grisel Lehmann and Andrew...
  
  , The Symbolist Aesthetic in France 1885-1895. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, 1968.
• The Oxford Companion to French Literature, Sir Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine, eds., (Oxford, 1959) ISBN 0-19-866104-5
• Praz, Mario
  Mario Praz
  Mario Praz KBE was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony , was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries...
  
  , The Romantic Agony (1930). ISBN 0-19-281061-8
• Symons, Arthur
  Arthur Symons
  Arthur William Symons , was a British poet, critic and magazine editor.-Life:Born in Milford Haven, Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy...
  
  , The Symbolist Movement in Literature
  The Symbolist Movement in Literature
  Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, and with additional material in 1919, is largely credited with bringing French Symbolism to the attention of Anglo-American literary circles. Its first two editions were vital influences on W. B. Yeats and T. S...
  
  (1899, rev. 1919)
• Wilson, Edmond
  Edmund Wilson
  Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
  
  , Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  ). ISBN 978-1-59853-013-1 (Library of America
  Library of America
  The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...
  
  )

External links

• Collection of German Symbolist art
• Les Poètes maudits by Paul Verlaine
  Paul Verlaine
  Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
  
   
• ArtMagick The Symbolist Gallery
• What is Symbolism in Art Ten Dreams Galleries - extensive article on Symbolism
• Symbolism Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau
  Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main emphasis was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists.- Biography :Moreau was born in Paris. His father, Louis Jean Marie...
  
  , Puvis de Chavannes, Odilon Redon
  Odilon Redon
  Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...
  
  
• Literary Symbolism Published in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006)