Often this insistence on mystery leads to a dark obscurity of language, especially with a symbol system in which the correspondences between the concrete term and its multiple associations seem private to the artist. “Start with an enigma, and then withdraw the key to the enigma” (72), Symons counsels those who would approach the Symbolist method. This “liberty,” as Symons calls it, from the governing principles of common discourse restores the “authentic speech” of mystery to literature. The Symbolist method focuses on these internal associations and frees poetic language from the restraints of logical sequence or referential accuracy. Symbols communicate indirectly: concrete images, such as the rose or the cross, summon up emotional and intellectual associations that cannot be precisely numbered or named. Symbols both reveal and conceal: they blend the visible and the invisible, the particular and the universal, the finite and the infinite. The Symbolists restored purity to the arts, Symons maintains, by suggesting rather than saying, by evoking through symbols rather than submitting to the “old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority” (5) and describing through the logic of argument or the record of details. Symbolism became a conscious movement in the late nineteenth century as a necessary reaction against the dense, descriptive method of the naturalistic school of Émile Zola and others. In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) Symons argues that symbolism is the essence of language and literature: our first words were symbolic, and all truly imaginative writers have been symbolists. Symbolism was introduced into the English-speaking world by Verlaine’s friend Arthur Symons (1865-1945). The Symbolist poem was necessarily short, evocative, and mysterious. Symbolist poets such as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, for example, rejected both the superficial rhetoric of argument and discussion and the dense notation of description and narration, all things that had obscured the true nature of poetry, in favor of the severe purity of a symbolic lyricism. The artists we classify as Symbolists aimed at purifying their art of all that was nonessential (some, such as Villiers de Lisle Adam, were dramatists a few, such as J. Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, the central figures in the theory and practice of symbolism in France, developed Edgar Allan Poe ‘s major premise about the poetic principle-that poetry is an evocation of eternal states through the discrete image or symbol- into a program for purifying poetry of the nonpoetic. Symbolism, an aesthetic movement devoted primarily to discovering the true nature of poetry, originated in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
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