One of the more original and distinctive British poets of the 1890s, Symons also became, as translator and critic, an important conduit through which French literary movements reshaped literature in English, most notably through his influences upon W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. His championing of the linked French schools of Impressionism, Decadence and Symbolism, and especially of the work of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, stimulated new thinking about the possibilities of modern poetry and its autonomy from moralising purposes. As a poet, he produced his best and most memorable work in the 1890s, in a kind of erotic lyric verse that evoked the influences of Baudelaire and Verlaine and anticipated – in mood, although not in form – the urban modernist poetics of Eliot and Ezra…
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Citation: Desmarais, Jane. "Arthur Symons". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 September 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4303, accessed 23 November 2024.]
