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| The Symbolist Movement in Literature, available now in paperback and hardback formats from Carcanet |
The Symbolist Movement in Literature has just been published by Carcanet, and this week on the blog we'd like to share with you an extract from the introduction by Matthew Creasy which explains why the book was so significant in its own time, and how it is still a key title today.
Some books change your life. In December 1908, while still an undergraduate in his junior year at Harvard, T.S. Eliot took down a new volume from the shelves of the Harvard Union. The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons contained eight essays on individual nineteenth-century French writers, from Gérard de Nerval to the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck. Although Eliot was already studying French literature under Irving Babbitt, Symons’ book was, he later recalled, ‘a revelation':
But if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the
French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in
Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly
new feelings, as a revelation. After we have read Verlaine and
Laforgue and Rimbaud and return to Mr. Symons’ book, we
may find that our own impressions dissent from his. The book
has not, perhaps, a permanent value for the one reader, but it
has led to results of permanent importance for him.
Eliot’s use of ‘we’ here is most likely editorial, but he was speaking for his peers too. For The Symbolist Movement was Symons’ most popular book: Mary Colum describes how undergraduates in Dublin ‘devoured’ it, amongst them James Joyce, whose biographer suggests that it set him reading and translating Paul Verlaine and packed him off to Paris at the end of 1902 in search of literary exile. Mallarmé too was to prove a lifelong interest for Joyce because of The Symbolist Movement, and Ezra Pound would describe Symons as one of his ‘gods’ (along with Plato, Dante, Longinus and others) in 1911.
© Matthew Creasy 2014
© Matthew Creasy 2014
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature and Selected Writings.
All books come with 10% off and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!