Critic and poet, born in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, SW Wales, UK. He did much to familiarize the British with the literature of France and Italy, producing several translations, and publishing the influential The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).
Life
Born in Wales, of Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy.
His first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. Symons contributed poems and essays to the Yellow Book, including an important piece which was later expanded into his book on The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
In 1902 he made a selection from his earlier verse, published as Poems. He translated from the Italian of Gabriele D'Annunzio The Dead City (1900) and The Child of Pleasure (1898), and from the French of Émile Verhaeren The Dawn (1898). To The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1905) he prefixed an essay on the deceased poet, who was a kind of English Verlaine and had many attractions for Symons.
Verse
Days and Nights (1889) Silhouettes (1892) London Nights (1895) Amoris victima (1897) Images of Good and Evil (1899) Poems (2 vols.), (1902) A Book of Twenty Songs (1905) Knave of Hearts (1913). Poems written between 1894 and 1908) Love's Cruelty (1923) Jezebel Mort, and other poems (1931)Essays
Studies in Two Literatures (1897) Aubrey Beardsley: An Essay with a Preface (1898) The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) Cities (1903), word-pictures of Rome, Venice, Naples, Seville, etc. A Study of Walter Pater (1934)Reference
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
User Comments Add a comment…