Arthur Symons

Figures of Several Centuries Arthur Symons

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) was a British poet, critic and magazine editor. He was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. He edited four of Bernard Quaritch's Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894, but his major editorial feat must be his work with the short-lived Savoy. His first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. His later verse is influenced by a close study of modern French writers, of Charles Baudelaire and of Paul Verlaine. He reflects French tendencies both in the subject-matter and style of his poems, in their eroticism and their vividness of description. Symons contributed poems and essays to the Yellow Book, including an important piece which was later expanded into his book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which would have a major influence on William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Amongst his other works are An Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886) and Figures of Several Centuries (1916).