The Symbolist Movement in Literature, written by the English poet, critic, and translator Arthur William Symons (1865-1945), is one of the pioneering works on symbolism. Translated into Turkish for the first time, this work has been compiled into a complete text by taking into account the three editions published during the author’s lifetime in 1899, 1908, and 1919.

Symons was a critic who lived through and witnessed developments towards the end of the 19th century—characterized by moral decay/degeneration and intense despair resulting from various scientific and industrial advancements and military defeats—that seemed to herald the two world wars. In this work, written in the atmosphere of a period marked by a departure from faith and values, he offers evaluations of poets and writers—the majority being French—who advocated for a firm and definitive return to spiritual values and religious/mystical views that people were tending to move away from, and who incorporated these themes into their works. Balzac, Prosper Mérimée, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the Goncourt Brothers, Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Léon Cladel, Zola, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, and Maeterlinck are brought together in this work as examples of symbolist literature.

“Literary movements usually spend their infancy in a state of rebellious dissatisfaction, but they reach maturity when they acquire a terminology and develop a common language. By the end of the 19th century, finding this common language had become difficult. In 1899, two influential books, one in the field of psychology and the other in literature, focused on the word symbolism: Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), published in Vienna in November, and Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published in London in September. Although their approaches were vastly different, both works investigated a kind of inner reality that existed largely outside the external world. Like Freud’s work, Symons’s study gave a name to a fascination with forms of meaning that are ambiguous or only partially understood—a fascination that, as we can see more clearly sixty years later, has become one of the fundamental orientations of modern thought...”

There are times in literature when allusion, suggestion, and the leaps of imagination are what matter. And there are times when drawing conclusions, synthesizing, and connecting are what matter. Symons found a moment when the latter approach was of great importance and, with his extraordinary capacity for assimilation, adopted it. As a result, just as Wordsworth had introduced the word ‘nature’ to romantic literature a century earlier, he introduced the word ‘symbol’ to modern literature...” (From Richard Ellmann’s Introduction to Symons’s book, 1958)