Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons, photo taken on September 22, 1906

Arthur William Symons (born February 28, 1865 in Milford Haven , Pembrokeshire , † January 22, 1945 in Wittersham , Kent ) was an English poet, critic, journalist, editor, travel writer and translator.

life and work

Symons became known for his lyrical work reflecting the spirit of decadence poetry and fin de siècle ( Days and Nights , 1889; London Nights , 1895), as a mediator of French symbolism in England ( The Symbolist Movement in Literature , 1899) and as an interpreter of the English Romanticism ( The Romantic Movement in English Poetry , 1909).

Although his poetic and literary works are among the most frequently anthologized texts of the English fin de siècle , they have hardly been received in the subsequent period. Long before his death, his extensive lyrical, narrative, dramatic and literary theoretical work was largely forgotten at the beginning of the 20th century.

After his birth as the son of a pastor and his upbringing by private tutors in Wales, Simons moved to London at the age of 16, where he quickly made new acquaintances and friends in the local literary circles and joined the so-called Rhymers' Club , a group by poets and writers, including William Butler Yeats and Ernest Dowson . At the age of 21, Simons published his first monograph in 1886 on the Victorian poet Robert Browning , whom he held in high esteem, under the title Introduction to the Study of Browning . Browning's poetic style was also clearly reflected in Simon's early poems, which he published in the Days and Nights collection in 1889 .

The following two volumes of poetry, Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895), on the other hand, reveal completely different influences and contain a number of his most remarkable poems and aesthetic texts. On the one hand, Symons had met such famous poets and writers as Stéphane Mallarmé , Paul Verlaine and Joris-Karl Huysmans during his stays in Paris in the early 1890s ; on the other hand, with his connection to the Rhymers' Club, he found a wealth of inspiration for his erotic and urban poems.

He and his friends from this club got to know London's nightlife on their nightly forays through the metropolis and became an intimate connoisseur of the London Music Hall , whose surroundings, scenery and dancers he then addressed in his lyrical texts. The impressions or impressions gained during his forays into the nightlife of the metropolis flowed largely into his urban poetry from this early creative phase, which was unmistakably shaped by the lyrical models of Charles Baudelaire and James McNeill Whistler .

The Savoy , title page of the August 1896 issue

The poems published in the Silhouettes and London Nights collections were later included in his two-volume anthology Poems , published in 1902, together with the poetry Symons published in Amoris Victima (1897) and Images of Good and Evil (1899) . In 1896 Symons became editor and editor of the new literary magazine Savoy . His seminal literary-theoretical and programmatic article The Decadent Movement in Literature , which first appeared in Harper's Magazine in November 1893 , he expanded in 1899 to the book publication The Symbolist Movement in Literature , in which he attempted to familiarize his English readership with French symbolism as a literary movement to make familiar, which Symons understood as an attempt to sublimate literature and elevate it into the spiritual ("an attempt to spiritualize literature").

Symon's early enthusiasm for the life of the London bohemian had given way to his growing doubts about the ideal of a “life like a flame” full of moments of ecstasy, which his mentor Walter Pater had promoted in the middle of his so-called Yellow Decade . While many of his literary companions went down in literary history as the tragic generation after their untimely death , Symons turned three years after the first publication of his monograph on the symbolist movement in France, which he dedicated to TS Eliot and with which he rose to become the doyen of the British decadence movement , from the Epicurean maxims of his contemporaries and from then on concentrated primarily on European symbolism.

This change in his literary or literary critical credo is also reflected in his later poems. In the volumes Amoris Victima (1897), Images of Good and Evil (1899) and The Fool of the World (1906), Symons, after his "purification" in texts that often seem romantic, brings back his reflection on his own religious roots and his love Expressing nature.

Regardless of his early about-face in his life and work, Symons suffered a physical and psychological breakdown during a stay in Italy in 1908, from which he never fully recovered. In the following years he published the only already published works and works as well as various travelogues, translations of French and Italian poems and various articles critical of literature, the quality of which, however, clearly documented his intellectual decline.

Nevertheless, from the standpoint of today's literary scholarship and criticism, Symons can be counted among the most important exponents of late Victorian poetry and prose due to his outstanding early work and can also be seen as an important pioneer of modernism in England.

Publications

The Symbolist Movement in Literature , 2nd revised and expanded edition, EP Dutton and Company, London 1919. First edition 1899. Reprinted by Echo Library, Fairford 2017.

expenditure

Poems , 2 volumes, Heinemann, London 1924 (first edition London 1901).
Collected works , 9 volumes, AMS Press, New York 1973 (first edition London 1924).
Selected letters 1880–1935 , edited by K.Beckson, University of Iowa Press, Iowa 1989.

literature

Karl Beckson: Arthur Symons: A Life. Oxford University Press , Oxford 1987.
Karl Beckson, Ian Fletcher, Lawrence W. Market, John Stokes: Arthur Symons: A Bibliography. ELT Johns Hopkins University Press , Baltimore, Maryland 1990, ISBN 978-094431-804-1 .
Sebastian Hayes: Arthur Symons: Leading Poet of the English Decadence. Brimstone Press, Shaftesbury 2007.

source

Bibliographisches Institut & FA Brockhaus AG, Der Brockhaus multimedial premium 2005, 2005

Web links

Commons : Arthur Symons - collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Author: Arthur Symons - Sources and full texts (English)

Literature by and about Arthur Symons in the catalog of the German National Library
Works by Arthur Simons on Project Gutenberg
Arthur Simons - Works by and about Arthur Symons in the Internet Archive
Arthur Symons 'Poems - extensive collection of Symons' poems on Poem Hunter
Arthur Symons (1865–1945) - works as audio books in audio versions at LibriVox
Arthur Symons 1865–1945 on Poetry Foundation (English)
Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic on Encyclopædia Britannica (English)

Individual evidence

↑ See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 569 f. Cf. also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic as well as the entry on the page of the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865-1945 . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
↑ See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 569 f. See also the information in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865-1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
↑ See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865–1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
↑ Quoted from the reprint on the Poetry Foundation page by Arthur Symons 1865–1945 . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
↑ See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865–1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.
↑ See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the discussion in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symon's English Poet and Critic . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

personal data
SURNAME	Symons, Arthur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Symons, Arthur William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English lyric poet and critic
DATE OF BIRTH	February 28, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH	Milford Haven
DATE OF DEATH	January 22, 1945
Place of death	Wittersham , Kent

[1] See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 569 f. Cf. also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic as well as the entry on the page of the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865-1945 . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

[2] See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 569 f. See also the information in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865-1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

[3] See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865–1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

[4] Quoted from the reprint on the Poetry Foundation page by Arthur Symons 1865–1945 . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

[5] See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the explanations in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symons English Poet and Critic and the entry on the Poetry Foundation Arthur Symons 1865–1945 page . Retrieved August 7, 2018.

[6] See Petra Pointner: Symons, Arthur. In: Metzler Lexicon of English-Speaking Authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Edited by Eberhard Kreutzer and Ansgar Nünning, Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , 666 pages (special edition Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, ISBN 978-3-476-02125-0 ), p. 570 See also the discussion in the Encyclopædia Britannica on Arthur Symon's English Poet and Critic . Retrieved August 7, 2018.