The Symbolist Movement in Literature - Influence

Influence

Arthur Symons was a close friend of Yeats, and the mutual influence was probably just as much one of conversation as of letters. Its dedicatory note (to Yeats) opens:

May I dedicate to you this book on the Symbolist movement in literature, both as an expression of a deep personal friendship and because you, more than any one else, will sympathise with what I say in it, being yourself the chief representative of that movement in our country? France is the country of movements, and it is naturally in France that I have studied the development of a principle which is spreading throughout other countries, perhaps not less effectually, if with less definite outlines....

T. S. Eliot, whose relationship with the book was significantly less dialectical—he discovered its second edition in bookshop while at Harvard, though he did eventually write to Symons—was perhaps even more influenced by it:

I owe Mr. Symons a great debt: but for having read his book I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue or Rimbaud; I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life.

Its importance for other contemporary writers was also, of course, profound. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce's most preeminent biographer, argues that Symons was a major influence for Joyce's decision to emigrate to Paris. In a later generation Symons' book was responsible, for example, for alerting the young British poet David Gascoyne to the appeal of French poets such as Rimbaud and Baudelaire, some of whom he was to memorably translate.