Tradition

Symbolism (movement)

Overview

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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Symbolism (movement) is discussed.

But such symbolism is on the fringe of life. It has an unessential element in its constitution. The very fact that it can be acquired in one epoch and discarded in another epoch testifies to its superficial nature. There are deeper types of symbolism, in a sense artificial, and yet such that we could not get on without them. Language, written or spoken, is such a symbolism. The mere sound of a word, or its shape on…
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect
names the idea; states what it is; the book is about it; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
The province of symbolism is extraordinarily wide: dream-symbolism is only a small part of it; it would not even be expedient to attack the whole problem from the side of dreams. Many of the symbols commonly occurring elsewhere either do not appear in dreams at all or appear very seldom; on the other hand, many of the dream-symbols are not met with in every other department, but, as you have…
Sigmund Freud, Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
After the scheme of symbolism has been settled upon, some definite technique must be invented by which the inner meaning of the sensible symbols used may be brought home to children. Adults being the formulators of the symbolism are naturally the authors and controllers of the technique. The result was that Froebel's love of abstract symbolism often got the better of his sympathetic insight; and there was…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
states what it is; names the idea
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Even persons of judgment and position, who have otherwise made great progress in psychoanalysis, have discontinued their support at this point. This is the more remarkable since, in the first place, symbolism is neither peculiar to the dream nor characteristic of it, and since in the second place, symbolism in the dream was not discovered through psychoanalysis, although the latter is not poor otherwise in making…
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
names the idea; states what it is
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
In so far as that primal cause is the same in all men, the _tonal subsoil_ is also the common one, comprehensible beyond the difference of language. Out of it now develops the more arbitrary gesture-symbolism which is not wholly adequate for its basis: and with which begins the diversity of languages, whose multiplicity we are permitted to consider--to use a simile--as a strophic text to that primal melody of the…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays Collected Works, Volume Two
names the idea; author linked in the graph
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Symbolism (movement)

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Symbolism (movement)

Related ideas

Place in the tradition