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Symbolism
Symbolism
1 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 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.
terest in religion and spirituality. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the decadents represent naturalist
interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case
this was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the worldweariness characteristic of the n de sicle period.
The symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French literary style that
immediately preceded it. While being inuenced by
hermeticism, allowing freer versication, and rejecting
Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained Parnassianisms love of word play and concern for the musical
qualities of verse. The symbolists continued to admire
Thophile Gautier's motto of "art for arts sake", and retained and modied Parnassianisms mood of ironic
detachment.[2] Many symbolist poets, including Stphane
Mallarm and Paul Verlaine, published early works in Le
Parnasse contemporain, the poetry anthologies that gave
Parnassianism its name. But Arthur Rimbaud publicly
mocked prominent Parnassians, and published scatological parodies of some of their main authors, including
Franois Coppe misattributed to Coppe himself in
L'Album zutique.[3]
One of Symbolisms most colourful promoters in Paris
was art and literary critic (and occultist) Josphin
Pladan, who established the Salon de la Rose + Croix.
The Salon hosted a series of six presentations of avantgarde art, writing and music during the 1890s, to give
a presentation space for artists embracing spiritualism,
mysticism, and idealism in their work. A number of Symbolists were associated with the Salon.
Movement
MOVEMENT
3.2 Techniques
The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versication in order to allow greater room for uidity,
and as such were sympathetic with the trend toward free
verse, as evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn and Ezra
Pound. Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather
than primarily to describe; symbolic imagery was used
to signify the state of the poets soul. T. S. Eliot was
inuenced by the poets Jules Laforgue, Paul Valry and
Arthur Rimbaud who used the techniques of the Symbolist school,[6] though it has also been said that 'Imagism'
was the style to which both Pound and Eliot subscribed
(see Pounds Des Imagistes). Synesthesia was a prized exHenri Fantin-Latour, By the Table, depicting: seated: Paul
perience; poets sought to identify and confound the sepVerlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Lon Valade, Ernest d'Hervilly and
arate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's
Camille Pelletan; standing: Pierre Elzar, Emile Blmont and
poem Correspondences, (considered to be the touchstone
Jean Aicard
of French Symbolism [7] ) also mentions forts de symboles forests of symbols
3.3
3
symbols, 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.[8] Symbolist symbols
are not allegories, intended to represent; they are instead
intended to evoke particular states of mind. The nominal
subject of Mallarm's Le cygne (The Swan") is of a
swan trapped in a frozen lake. Signicantly, in French,
cygne is a homophone of signe, a sign. The overall eect
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 dchirer avec un coup daile ivre
Ce lac dur oubli que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui nont pas fui!
Un cygne dautrefois se souvient que cest lui
Magnique mais qui sans espoir se dlivre...
Verlaine argued that in their individual and very dierent ways, each of these hitherto neglected poets found
genius a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned
to avoid hermeticism and idiosyncratic writing styles.[10]
They were also portrayed as at odds with society, having
and Rimbaud's poem Voyelles:
tragic lives, and often given to self-destructive tendencies. These traits were not hindrances but consequences
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu :
of their literary gifts. Verlaines concept of the pote
voyelles. . .
maudit in turn borrows from Baudelaire, who opened his
collection Les eurs du mal with the poem Bndiction,
(A black, E white, I red, U green,
which describes a poet whose internal serenity remains
O blue: vowels. . .)
undisturbed by the contempt of the people surrounding
[11]
both poets seek to identify one sense experience him.
with another. The earlier Romanticism of poetry used In this conception of genius and the role of the poet,
3.4
Philosophy
MOVEMENT
Schopenhauers aesthetics represented shared concerns and in contrast, he turns his back on life (tourne lpaule
with the symbolist programme; they both tended to con- la vie) and he exclaims:
sider Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of
Je me mire et me vois ange! Et je meurs, et j'aime
strife and will. As a result of this desire for an artis Que la vitre soit l'art, soit la mysticit
tic refuge, the symbolists used characteristic themes
A renatre, portant mon rve en diadme,
of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of
Au ciel antrieur o eurit la Beaut!
mortality, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality,
which Albert Samain termed a fruit of death upon the
tree of life.[13] Mallarm's poem Les fentres[14] exI marvel at myself, I seem an
presses all of these themes clearly. A dying man in a hosangel! and I die, and I love
pital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of
Whether the glass might be art,
his physical surroundings, turns toward his window but
or mysticism
then turns away in disgust from
To be reborn, bearing my dream as
a diadem,
Under that former sky where
Beauty once ourished!"[9]
3.6
Periodical literature
The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely
personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references.
More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting inuenced the contemporary Art Nouveau
style and Les Nabis.[12]
4.2 Music
Symbolism had some inuence on music as well. Many
symbolist writers and critics were early enthusiasts of the
music of Richard Wagner, an avid reader of Schopenhauer.
The symbolist aesthetic aected the works of Claude Debussy. His choices of libretti, texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the symbolist canon. Compositions
such as his settings of Cinq pomes de Baudelaire, various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera Pellas
et Mlisande with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, and
his unnished sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, The
Devil in the Belfry and The Fall of the House of Usher,
all indicate that Debussy was profoundly inuenced by
5 EFFECT
4.3
Prose ction
Lugn-Poe (18691940) was an actor, director, and theatre producer of the late nineteenth century. Lugn-Poe
sought to create a unied nonrealistic theatre of poetry and dreams through atmospheric staging and stylized acting.[20] Upon learning about symbolist theatre,
he never wanted to practice any other form. After beginning as an actor in the Thtre Libre and Thtre d'Art,
Lugn-Poe grasped on to the symbolist movement and
founded the Thtre de l'uvre where he was manager
from 1892 until 1929. Some of his greatest successes include opening his own symbolist theatre, producing the
rst staging of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), and introducing French theatregoers to playwrights such as Ibsen
and Strindberg.[20]
The later works of the Russian playwright Anton
Chekhov have been identied as being much inuenced
by symbolist pessimism. Both Constantin Stanislavski
and Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with symbolist
modes of staging in their theatrical endeavors.
Drama by symbolist authors formed an important part of
the repertoire of the Thtre de l'uvre and the Thtre
d'Art.
5 Eect
4.4
Theatre
Black night.
White snow.
The wind, the wind!
It will not let you go. The wind, the wind!
Through Gods whole world it blows
The wind is weaving
The white snow.
Brother ice peeps from below
Stumbling and tumbling
Folk slip and fall.
God pity all!
7
From The Twelve (1918)
Trans. Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky [21]
Night, street and streetlight, drug store,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century
Nothing will change. Theres no way out.
You'll die and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canals rippled icy surface,
The drug store, the street, and streetlight.
6 Symbolists
things that are dyingthe whole bellelettristic 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.[23]
After the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism had
a major eect on Russian poetry even as it became The Shore of Oblivion (1889) by Eugen Bracht
less popular in France. Russian symbolism, steeped in
the Eastern Orthodoxy and the religious doctrines of
Vladimir Solovyov, had little in common with the French 6.1 Precursors
style of the same name. It began the careers of several
major poets such as Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and
William Blake (17571827) English writer (Songs
Marina Tsvetaeva. Belys novel Petersburg (1912) is conof Innocence)
sidered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.
Caspar David Friedrich (17741840) German
In Romania, symbolists directly inuenced by French
painter (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog)
poetry rst gained inuence during the 1880s, when
Alexandru Macedonski reunited a group of young poets
Alexander Pushkin (17991837) Russian poet and
associated with his magazine Literatorul. Polemicizing
writer (Eugene Onegin)
REFERENCES
painters
and
7 Gallery
Gustav Klimt - Allegory of Skulptur
Jan Toorop (18581928), The Three Brides
Fernand Khnop's Incense
Mikhail Vrubel, The Swan Princess
La mort du fossoyeur (The death of the gravedigger) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium
of symbolist motifs. Death and angels, pristine
snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all
express symbolist longings for transguration anywhere, out of the world.
Franz von Stuck, Susanna
The cover to Aleksander Blok's 1909 book, Theatre.
Konstantin Somov's illustrations for the Russian
symbolist poet display the continuity between symbolism and Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey
Beardsley.
8 See also
Visionary art
9 References
[1] Balakian, Anna, The Symbolist Movement: a critical appraisal. Random House, 1967, ch. 2
6.2
Authors
6.3
[8] Olds, Marshal C. Literary Symbolism, originally published (as Chapter 14) in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin
J. H. Dettmar. Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Pages 155162.
[9] Translation for Wikipedia
[10] Paul Verlaine, Les Potes maudits
[11] Charles Baudelaire, Bndiction
[12] Delvaille, Bernard, La posie symboliste: anthologie, introduction. ISBN 2-221-50161-6
[13] Luxure, fruit de mort l'arbre de la vie... , Albert Samain,
Luxure, in the publication Au jardin de l'infante (1889)
[14] Stphane Mallarm, Les fentres
[15] David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian orientalism: Asia in the Russian mind from Peter the Great to the
emigration, New Haven: Yale UP, 2010, p. 211
[16] Olds, above, p. 160
11 External links
Collection of German Symbolist art
Les Potes maudits by Paul Verlaine (French)
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Further reading
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