Symbolism

A late nineteenth-century French literary movement that reacted against Naturalism and Realism's descriptive, objective aims, seeking instead to evoke inner states, ideas and moods through suggestive, musical imagery and symbol rather than direct statement or description. Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) is read as the movement's acknowledged precursor, though the movement takes its name and formal founding from Jean Moreas's 1886 Symbolist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro, and centers on poets including Stephane Mallarme, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. Its insistence that poetry should approach the indirection and suggestiveness of music influenced literary movements well beyond France, including aspects of English and Irish Modernism.