Artists Among Poets - Symbolism

Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. 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":

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.

The sphinx was a hybrid monster, part human, part lion, sometimes shown with eagle wings and a serpent's tail also, who blocked the mountain path to the city of Thebes and posed riddles to all who would pass. If the traveler was not able to answer, he or she was torn to pieces.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In literature, symbolism had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. The label "symbolist" itself comes from the critic Jean Moréas, who coined it in order to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadent movement in literature and art.

Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. T.S. Eliot was one of these poets. Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and color. In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences, which also speaks tellingly of forêts de symboles — forests of symbols —

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's poem Voyelles:

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

— both poets seek to identify one sense experience with another.