Symbolist movement summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Symbolism.

Symbolist movement, Literary movement that originated with a group of French poets in the late 19th century, spread to painting and the theatre, and influenced Russian, European, and American arts of the 20th century. Reacting against the rigid conventions of traditional French poetry, as seen in the precise description favoured by the Parnassian poets, Symbolist poets sought to convey individual emotional experience through the subtle, suggestive use of highly metaphorical language. The arcane and indirect meaning of the symbol is evoked as a substitute for the increasingly attenuated sense of collective and universal meanings. Principal Symbolist poets included the Frenchmen Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, and the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren. Many Symbolists were also identified with the Decadent movement. Just as Symbolist painters avoided concrete representation in favour of fantasy and imagination, Symbolist dramatists relied on myth, mood, and atmosphere to reveal only indirectly the deeper truths of existence.

Paul Claudel Summary

Paul Claudel was a poet, playwright, essayist, a towering force in French literature of the first half of the 20th century, whose works derive their lyrical inspiration, their unity and scope, and their prophetic tone from his faith in God. Claudel, the brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel, was

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok Summary

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok was a poet and dramatist, the principal representative of Russian Symbolism, a modernist literary movement that was influenced by its European counterpart but was strongly imbued with indigenous Eastern Orthodox religious and mystical elements. Blok was born into a

Stéphane Mallarmé Summary

Stéphane Mallarmé was a French poet, an originator (with Paul Verlaine) and a leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry. Mallarmé enjoyed the sheltered security of family life for only five brief years, until the early death of his mother in August 1847. This traumatic experience was echoed 10

Paul Verlaine, detail from Un Coin de table, oil painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1872; in the Louvre, Paris.

Paul Verlaine Summary

Paul Verlaine was a French lyric poet first associated with the Parnassians and later known as a leader of the Symbolists. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire, he formed the so-called Decadents. Verlaine was the only child of an army officer in comfortable circumstances. He was