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Symbolism and Decadence: The Late Romantic Transformation of the Imagination

The Symbolist movement and the related Decadent movement of the late nineteenth century were, in many ways, the last great flowering of the Romantic tradition in European literature. Building on the work of the early Romantics and on the more metaphysical and idealistic strands of late Romanticism, the Symbolists and Decadents turned away from the public, political, and didactic concerns of mid-century literature and developed a new art of the inner world — of dreams, reverie, the unconscious, the senses, the symbol, the suggestion, the music of words. The major Symbolists — Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé — and the related Decadents (Huysmans, Wilde, the early Yeats, the early Joyce) helped give birth to twentieth-century modernism, and they remain among the most influential writers of the modern period.

This page offers a structured introduction to the Symbolist and Decadent movements — their origins, their major figures, their characteristic themes, and their long influence.

The Origins of Symbolism

The Symbolist movement emerged in France in the 1850s and 1860s, in the wake of the great French Romantic tradition. Several factors contributed to its rise:

The exhaustion of the earlier Romantic model — the great Romantic writers had, by the 1850s, exhausted many of the resources of the early Romantic project, and a younger generation was looking for new ways of writing about the inner world.
The new philosophy of art — the late-Romantic and Idealist philosophers (Schopenhauer, Hartmann, the late Hegelians) had developed a new aesthetics that emphasized the deeper, metaphysical dimension of the work of art.
The new science of the unconscious — the psychological research of the period, including the work of Charcot, Janet, and others, had begun to explore the unconscious life of the mind, and the Symbolists were eager to give this new vision literary form.
The example of Wagner — Richard Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, with its union of music, poetry, drama, and visual art, was a major influence on the Symbolist conception of the work of art.
The new drug culture — the experience of opium, hashish, and other psychoactive substances, which several of the Symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gautier) cultivated, gave the new literature its characteristic atmosphere of dream, vision, and altered consciousness.

The Major Figures

The major Symbolist and Decadent writers include:

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) — author of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), the great founding text of Symbolism, and of the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris (1869). Baudelaire’s poetry, with its new attention to the beauty of the modern city, the dark and the demonic, the senses, the artificial paradises of drugs and sex, and the strange correspondences between the natural and the spiritual, became the model for the whole Symbolist movement.
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) — the great hermetic poet of the Symbolist movement, author of Hérodiade (1871), L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876), and the difficult, dense, and mysterious later poems. Mallarmé was also a major critic and theorist, and his Tuesday evening gatherings at his Paris apartment became a kind of intellectual forum for the whole Symbolist movement.
Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) — author of Poèmes saturniens (1866), Fêtes galantes (1869), Romances sans paroles (1874), and Sagesse (1881). Verlaine’s poetry, with its musical flow, its suggestion and atmosphere, and its personal and emotional content, became a major model for the Symbolist style.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) — the precocious genius of the Symbolist movement, author of Une Saison en enfer (1873) and the Illuminations (1886). Rimbaud’s later abandonment of literature, after a brief blaze of creative work in his late teens, became part of the Romantic myth of the artist who burns out and turns away from the world.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907) — the great Decadent novelist, author of À rebours (1884), the central document of the Decadent movement. The novel traces the life of the aristocratic aesthete des Esseintes, who cultivates a life of refined sensation and aesthetic experience in his country house.
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) — the great Irish writer, playwright, and critic, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the plays Salomé (1891) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), the Intentions (1891) of critical essays, and the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas published as De Profundis (1905). Wilde is the most famous of the late-nineteenth-century Decadent writers, and his trial and imprisonment in 1895 became one of the great public events of the late Victorian period.
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) — the major English-language Decadent poet, author of Atalanta in Calydon (1865), Poems and Ballads (1866), and Songs before Sunrise (1871). The page on The Pre-Raphaelites treats the close relation of Swinburne to the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) — the great Irish poet, whose early work is deeply indebted to the Symbolist movement, and who became one of the major figures of twentieth-century English-language poetry. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1893) and The Wind among the Reeds (1899) are important documents of the late Symbolist-Decadent moment in English literature.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and the late Pre-Raphaelites — whose sensuous, dreamlike, “stunner” images of women were major contributions to the development of the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements.
Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Odilon Redon (1840–1916), Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898) — the great Symbolist painters, whose mysterious, allegorical, and richly colored works were major visual contributions to the Symbolist project.

The Central Concepts

The Symbolists and Decadents developed several central concepts that had a major influence on later thought:

The symbol — the Romantics had distinguished the symbol from the allegory, and the Symbolists took this distinction further, arguing that the symbol, unlike the allegory, is a translucent image that points to a reality it cannot directly express.
Suggestion — the Symbolists argued that poetry should not directly state its meaning, but should suggest it through the music of the words, the texture of the images, and the subtle play of associations.
Correspondences — Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances” (1857) made the idea of hidden correspondences between the senses, between the natural and the spiritual worlds, between the visible and the invisible, into a central Symbolist theme.
The artist as priest — the Symbolists inherited the Romantic conception of the artist as a kind of secular priest, and they developed it in new ways, especially in the idea of the artist as the interpreter of a deeper reality.
The “decadent” sensibility — the late Romantics and the Decadents cultivated a sensibility of refined, exhausted, artful experience, in which the charms of the artificial, the morbid, the unusual, the exotic, and the forbidden took the place of the older Romantic ideals of nature, feeling, and the heroic self.

The Long Influence of Symbolism

The Symbolist and Decadent movements had a profound influence on twentieth-century literature, art, and thought. The modernism of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and the others, the Surrealism of André Breton, the Existentialism of Sartre and Camus, the contemporary tradition of the lyric poem, the contemporary tradition of the symbolist novel — all draw, in different ways, on the Symbolist inheritance. The visual tradition of Symbolist painting has been equally influential, from the early abstraction of Kandinsky and Mondrian to the contemporary tradition of the symbolist visual imagination.

Symbolism and Decadence: The Late Romantic Transformation of the Imagination

The Origins of Symbolism

The Major Figures

The Central Concepts

The Long Influence of Symbolism

Further Reading

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