The symbolist movement began in the latter part of the 19th century with a group of French poets. In addition, it influenced European as well as American literature in the 20th century. The artists of the Symbolist movement sought to express emotions through subtle and subtle usage of highly symbolic language.
The Symbolist Literature
The main Symbolist poets are Frenchmen Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Henri de Regnier, Rene Ghil, and Gustave Kahn the Belgians Emile Verhaeren and Georges Rodenbach the Greek-born Jean Moreas and Francis Viele-Griffin Stuart Merrill and Stuart Merrill, who were American by birth.
It was Remy de Gourmont, as well as the Symbolist Criteria, who was the primary Symbolist critic. They well suit to the novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans and to the theater by Maurice Maeterlinck. The French poets Paul Valery and Paul Claudel Sometimes, they are regard as the direct 20th-century descendants of the Symbolists.
Symbolism was born out of the rebellion of a group of French poets who were dissatisfy with the rigid guidelines that govern technique as well as thematic themes within tradition French poetics. Which is evident in the exact descriptions of Parnassian poetry. The Symbolists wanted to free poetics from expository purposes and formalized oratory.
In order to convey the brief and immediate experiences of internal life and. In their attempt to invoke the inescapable sensations of human experience and convey the fundamental mystery of the universe, they used flimsy and intimate metaphors and images. These metaphors and images, despite lacking specific meaning, nevertheless conveyed the poet’s state of mind, and hinted at an unreachable unity.
Symbolism Of Painting Literary Theorists
The symbolism of painting got its inspiration from literary theorists and poets of the period. But it also represented an opposition to the objectives of objectivism. Realism and the ever-increasingly influential movement of Impressionism. In contrast to the more specific representation that these movements were seeking, symbolist painters favored works inspired by fantasy and imagination.
This symbolist art movement was definitively established by the young critic Albert Aurier. A passionate admirer of Paul Gauguin, in an article in the Mercure de France in 1891. He further elaborated on Moreas’s assertion that the goal that art serves are to clothe the idea in sensuous form. He emphasized the symbolic, subjective and decorative purposes of art. It is meant to convey the soul. To invoke a subjective state of mind, symbolist artists took on the occult and the mystical.
Some of the Postimpressionist painters, such as Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, and the Nabis, would be classified as Symbolists. Three main figures that exemplify Symbolist aesthetic ideals are Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Moreau was a figurative artist who painted scenes based on legends or old themes.
His distinctive style employed stunning, jewel-like hues to depict the elaborate lavish interiors of fantasy palaces and temples. In which bare chest figures are portrait in imposing poses. His work is distinguishing by exotic eroticism as well as decorative elegance.
Redon looked into the mysterious, fantastical and sometimes macabre themes that he uses in the paintings and illustrations. His work focuses on the poetics of color with its delicate shades of hues. His subject matter was incredibly personal with its fantasy and dream-like characters. Puvis of Chavannes was most famous for his murals.
Symbolist Theatre
Dramatists also learned from French Symbolist poets and particularly from Mallarme. As drama critic for La Derniere Mode in the 1870s, Mallarme fought the popular Realist theater and argued for the creation of a poetic theater. This would bring out the mysteries of the universe and man. The art of drama, to Mallarme is an act of worship that allows the poet-dramatist to reveal the connections between the visible and the invisible world through the power of suggestion in poetry.
According to the symbolist writer, the deeper realities of life, which are intuitive and instinctive, cannot be express directly, but only indirectly through symbol, myth and mood. The most important Symbolist playwrights were Maurice Maeterlinck in Belgium and Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Paul Claudel in France. In addition, they were influence by the Symbolist views of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg as well as of the Irish writer and actor W.B.Yeats.
Some notable examples of Symbolist theater include Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s Axel first performed 1884 and definitive edition 1890, Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande 1892 1992, with its dreamy setting, and the extremely humorous Ubu Roi 1896 by Alfred Jarry. In 1890, the French poet Paul Fort It was the birthplace of was the Theatre D’art.
Here, Symbolist productions were performed, as well as readings of modern and ancient poetry. When Fort retired in 1892, Fort resigned. Symbolist productions continued in Lugne-Poe’s Theater de l’uvre until the beginning of the Well. Even though symbolist theatre didn’t last long as a cohesive movement, its stark break from the traditional and its emphasis on imagination, atmosphere and mood had a profound influence on 20th-century playwrights and theatre productions.