Neil Bowen on
Symbolism
‘The symbolistes, who believed in indirect expression, reverie and inspiration, had much in common with the aesthetes and also view art as an escape from the grind of human reality, not a reflection of or on life but a step back from it. Symbolism is often seen as a reaction to both the systematizing of Darwin and Marx, and the exhaustion of realism … The idealist and aestheticist philosophy of the symbolistes insisted upon the autonomy of the poem together with the importance of the mystical and spiritual worlds they alluded to through symbols and phrases. They also advocated that the poet needed to revel in sensuality and in language, such that Pound and Eliot took from Mallarmé the belief that they should “purify the dialect of the tribe”. Words and expressions should be chosen with precision for their intensity, the everyday transcended in the ideal, and linguistic profundity achieved by typographical experimentation and lexical accuracy; as Valéry expressed it, prose walks, in straight lines and even paces, but poetry should dance gracefully, with leaps, turns and pirouettes … While symbolism also flourished in drama and art, foremost among the symbolistes were the poets Rimbaud, Verlaine and Mallarmé, who, to varying degrees, abandoned the constraints of rhyme, form and metre in favour of a free verse which stressed rhythm and musicality in poems that frequently concentrated on death, the erotic and intense mystical and religious feelings … Symbolism is often used as a method of uniting the internal and the external or projecting the internal onto external, as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” or Lawrence’s “The Fox.”’
Peter Childs Modernism London: Routledge, 2000. 95; 190.
So although Symbolism may see close to Romanticism, it differs in the accuracy, precision, concreteness and intensity of the Symbol. The Modernists reject Romanticism as verbose, overly effusive and subjective, abstract and lacking exactitude.
Yeats and Symbolism
‘It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings beside the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious argument, into the abundance and depth of nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life’
W.B. Yeats, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” (1900). Edward Larrissey (ed.) W.B. Yeats: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1997. 351.
Great art is ‘among the things that return for ever’: goes on to write ‘Civilization, too, will not that also destroy where it has loved, until it shall bring the simple and natural things again, and a new Argo with all the gliding on her bows sail out to find another Fleece’
“Yeats, “Discoveries” (1906) Essays and Introductions. London; Macmillan, 1961. 290.
So Yeats takes from Symbolism a capacity to construct universal, mythic symbols which redeem the degradation, as he sees it, of the modern world, by being repositories of the ideals which he foists upon former classical civilisations (as Byzantium – see below).
Byzantium and the Anima Mundi: the eternal universal memory