Symbolism

Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and art. The movement spread to other areas of the arts, in ways not always connected to the original literary movement. In particular Symbolist painting spread all over the Western world, in a wide variety of styles.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Symbolism (movement)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Symbolism is late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 43 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶