Aghast at the stark objectivity and briskly detached portraits of human suffering portrayed in Realist literature, Symbolists revolted against Realism's obsession with the empirical. Suffering from a rigor mortis of the rational, Symbolist poets turned inward to seek truth, exploring subjective... [more]

Aghast at the stark objectivity and briskly detached portraits of human suffering portrayed in Realist literature, Symbolists revolted against Realism's obsession with the empirical. Suffering from a rigor mortis of the rational, Symbolist poets turned inward to seek truth, exploring subjective moods and shifting feelings. A later tributary of the wider Romantic current, Symbolism illuminated the intangible aspects of human experience, particularly the subtle nuances of the psyche. Repulsed by the minute, almost clinical descriptions of the purely external extolled in Realistic and Naturalistic literature, the insurgent poets relied on mystical, image-laden metaphors and symbols to recreate the inner state of human consciousness, which they believed poetry should nourish. Stylistically lyric, fluid, and free form, Symbolist poetry rejected technical convention and literal imagery, focusing on personal, obscure, or esoteric symbols of the soul. Claiming Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire as their idols, the Symbolists' immersion into the aesthetic mysteries created both free verse and the prose poem. French poets Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and Stephen Mallarme represented the soul of the Symbolist movement. However, the movement soon conquered Europe, inaugurating Russia's "Silver Age" of poetry, while also becoming a major influence in Britain. The Symbolist preoccupation with inner awareness, their webwork of central, suggestive symbols and patterns of images rather than linear narrative, profoundly influenced virtually every major Modernist writer to follow. Symbolist influences appear most overtly in the novels of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, and in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Rainier Maria Rilke, Paul Valery, and D. H. Lawrence. [show less]