Symons, Arthur (sĭm`ənz), 1865–1945, English poet and critic. A leader of the symbolists symbolists, in literature, a school originating in France toward the end of the 19th cent. in reaction to the naturalism and realism of the period. Designed to convey impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, symbolism found its first expression in
..... Click the link for more information. in England, Symons interpreted French decadent poetry to the English through translations, criticism, and his own imitative poems. He was editor of the Savoy (1896) until a period of insanity, movingly described in his Confessions (1930), incapacitated him from 1908 to 1910. After that time he was forced to live very quietly. His chief critical work is The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899); others are The Romantic Movement in English Poetry (1909) and studies of Baudelaire, Blake, and Rossetti. His poetry includes Days and Nights (1889), Poems (1902), and Love's Cruelty (1923).

Bibliography

See biography by K. Beckson (1987); studies by J. M. Munro (1969) and L. W. Market (1987).

Symons, Arthur (William)

(born Feb. 28, 1865, Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Eng.—died Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham, Kent) English poet and critic. He contributed to The Yellow Book, an avant-garde journal, and edited The Savoy (1896). His Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), the first English work championing the French Symbolist movement in poetry, summed up a decade of interpretation and influenced William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot. His poetry, mainly disillusioned in feeling, appears in such volumes as Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895). He also translated the poetry of Paul Verlaine and wrote travel pieces. After a nervous breakdown in 1908, he produced little apart from Confessions (1930), a moving account of his illness.