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Symbolist Movement: Charles Baudelaire
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The poet Jean Moreas first gave title to the movement in 1886,with his Symbolist Manifesto. He rejected the doctrines of Naturalism by novelist Emile Zola, and in his manifesto he singled out three poets as leading figures in the movement: Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery. Through their writings these poets supported and contributed to the Symbolist painter's success. Of the visual artists three stand out as the forerunners of Symbolism: Gustave Moreau, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, and Odilon Redon. Puvis is known to be a precursor to the Symbolist movement, and although he never identified himself as a symbolist, and remained an independent artist, he was a great influence to the next generation of painters involved in the movement. He was quoted as saying, "I wish to be not Nature, but parallel to Nature."
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Wilde's affiliation with the Symbolist movement is clear; it should be noted, though, that he had equally strong ties to another movement, itself closely allied with Symbolism: the Decadent poets of the 1890's. Never an exclusive or well-defined school, the Decadents drew their inspiration from many of the same sources as the Symbolists, such as the poems of Baudelaire and the dramas of Maeterlinck. Their emphasis, though, was on the importance of art for its own sake. Art must be independent of moral and social concerns, they believed, and must concentrate on style above all else. "Style in decadent art asphyxiates its subject," Conrad claims, and indeed, most of Wilde's other works, and most certainly his lifestyle and biography, attest to his agreement. [31] The inspiration for Decadent art was to be found in aestheticism, the cultivation of an ideal art, a new form of beauty -- leading to the extreme pole of Dandyism.
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The Symbolist movement was first identified in literature; poets such as Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and others began writing mysterious and elegantly polished verse shortly after mid-century. The Symbolist Manifesto in literature was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Visual artists were less likely to publish such theoretical charters in the nineteenth century, and the emergence of Symbolist painting is therefore harder to chart. Nonetheless, the movement quickly became multi-disciplinary and international. Brussels became one of the leading centers of Symbolist art and literature. Although Les XX were not exclusively Symbolist, one of the founders of the society, Fernand Khnopff, was a leading Symbolist.
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The Symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were aligned with the movement towards free verse, a direction very much in evidence in the poems of Gustave Kahn. Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's poem Correspondences which ... speaks tellingly of forêts de symboles — forests of symbols —
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In its primary context, then, Symbolism refers to the four poets who preceded the Symbolist movement: Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Paul Verlaine (1844–96), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91). They are aiso the principal sources of influence on many of the writers outside of France who were drawn to the new aesthetic tendency they helped define. Each in his own way was responsible for powerful innovation, having gathered up the principal threads of the French poetic tradition since the sixteenth century along with German, British, and American contributions to Romanticism. Beyond the simple designation of an aesthetic tendency, Symbolism is a useful term as applied to the works of these poets in that it refers at once to an important feature of poetic content and to an attitude toward the figurative operation of literary language.
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The symbolist movement had its beginning in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whose Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857) and Le spleen de Paris (1869) were judged as decadent by his contemporaries. Stéphane Mallarmé’s literary salon and poetry, such as L’après-midi d’un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1876), carried on the movement; his prose studies Divigations (Ramblings, 1897) formed one of the most important statements of symbolist aesthetics. Three works of poetry chiefly associated with the movement are Paul Verlaine’s Romances sans paroles (Songs Without Words, 1874) and Arthur Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat, 1871) and Une saison en enfers (A Season in Hell, 1873).
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Charles Baudelaire