The Symbolist Movement
There have been various aspects of literature that add up to its style and form and augment the beauty of this work. Images, figurative languages, rhyme schemes as well as symbols, and other such devices facilitate the writing of these works.
Symbols refer to words or images that say something else and signify something else. In such a way all words end up becoming symbols.
When we strictly restrict ourselves to the literary world, the term symbols mean a word or a phrase that signifies an object or event that in turn suggests a range of reference or signifies something beyond its literal meaning.
Symbols form an important part of study and analysis of literary works, therefore there may be chances that student working upon the same may require assignment help on the topic.
From the elaborate use of these symbols did originate the symbolist movement which comprised of various poets and writers who made extensive use of symbols in their works. Various poets of the Romantic period, including Percy Bysshe Shelley in England, Holderlin and Novalis in Germany, often made extensive use of private symbols in their poetry.
For example, Shelley made symbolic use of objects such as winding caves, the morning and the evening star, as well as the conflict between a serpent and an eagle and a boat moving upstream. All these symbols gave way to symbolism as a movement.
Symbolism was a movement that referred to nothing but an extensive use of symbols by the poets of the movement. The poets came up with their own personal symbols that attracted a wide reader base for their works. These symbols served a greater purpose of attracting the audience than could be done by the direct use of the words.
Among all his contemporaries, William Blake was the best and exceeded all in the use of the symbols. He moved ahead of all his romantic contemporaries in his sustained and persistent use of symbolism. He employed a coherent system that was composed of several symbolic elements, in both his lyric poems as well as his long epic or prophetic poems.
As we take a journey to America, we see that in the 19th century America, a symbolist procedure was a prominent element in the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, in the prose of Henry David Thoreau as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in the poetic theory of Edgar Allan Poe.
The native Puritan tradition of divine typology was from where these writers derived the mode or to say a major part of the mode. Besides they were also influenced from the theory of correspondences of the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.
Basing our studies on the research paper writings of various literary historians we learn that the Symbolist Movement was used to refer to a group of French writers beginning with Charles Baudelaire, who wrote his masterpiece Fleurs du mal in 1857.
It then went on to include later poets like Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery and Arthur Rimbaud. Baudelaire followed the footsteps of Edgar Allan Poe and based the symbolic mode of his poems in part, on his examples.
But a special focus was given to the ancient belief in correspondences, which refers to the doctrine that there exists an inherent and systematic analogy between the outer world and the human mind as well as between the material and the spiritual worlds.
Baudelaire, in one of his doctrines, says that everything ranging from form, number, movement, perfume, color in the natural world, as in the spiritual world, is reciprocal, significative, correspondent and converse.
The techniques of the French symbolists had an immense influence throughout the Europe because they exploited an order of private symbols in their poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than in poetry of explicit signification.
The influence, in no time spread widely in England and America, on poets such as Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons as well as Dylan Thomas, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. On a similar note, we had major symbolist poets in Germany like Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke.
As we moved towards the Modern period of English Literature, the period after World War I, we saw a notable era in literature. This was a time when the writers drifted away from all the previous styles writing and brought out experiments in their works. This was a time when various isms developed like Imagism, Realism, Symbolism, Surrealism and the like. Most of the works in this age were symbolist in their settings, their actions, their agents as well as the objects they refer to. There are many instances of a persistently symbolic procedure that occur in lyrics such as:
- The Byzantium poems by William Butler Yeats
- The series of poems Altarwise by Owl Light by Dylan Thomas
- The Bridge by Hart Crane
- The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Symbolism was not only a movement in the sphere of literature but in all art forms. The movement gained impetus as against the two isms of naturalism and realism.
As a leap away from literature, symbolism in other arts was related to the Gothic style of Impressionism as well as Romanticism. The basic aim of this symbolism was to give a closing to all the ideas, a sensory form.
The symbolic art form always gave the impression that the ideas never actually suggest what they are, that is, all concrete ideas do not manifest themselves, rather they are sensory appearances that represent something else.
The advent of the Victorian age brought a clash between the concepts of religion and science as a result all the ideas of good and evil were being questioned.
Thus, this symbolist movement began and was led by painters who wanted to convey an intrinsic meaning in their art rather than the objective world. Hence, the points stated above, on the symbolist movement are sufficient enough to offer assignment help to students.