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Arthur William Symons (28 February 186522 January 1945)verifiable from census records and 1939 Register was a British poet, critic, translator and magazine editor.
In 1892, The Minister's Call, Symons' first play, was produced by the Independent Theatre Society – a private club – to avoid censorship by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. Arthur Symons: 1865–1945A Chronology . Retrieved 15 January 2009
Symons conducted a series of affairs throughout his life, but around 1893, he began a long-term relationship with a secret lover who has never been identified but whom he called "Lydia" and commemorated in his book Amoris Victima (1897). On June 19, 1901 he married Rhoda Bowser (1874–1936), an aspiring actress and oldest daughter of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne shipping magnate.see Freebmd.org.uk, or GRO registers plus census returns
Lydia Symons, Symons' mother, died in March 1896. She and Symons have been described as having had an affectionate relationship, about which Symons wrote a sonnet. The same year, Symons met and began an extensive correspondence with Sarojini Naidu. Their letters contain advice he gave regarding her work as a poet and exhibit their ambiguous relationship. A scholar speculates that Symons viewed Naidu as a daughter, mother, and lover.
Symons' 1897 book Studies in Two Literatures was one of his earliest works as a serious critic and established lyricism, mysticism, profundity, modernity, and sincerity as the various traits he would consider in his critiques. His 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature emphasized the importance of both lyricism and mysticism, with the latter being particularly important to Symons' beliefs regarding both poets and symbolists.
Throughout this time, Symons' mental health declined. His growing depression and acedia has been attributed to the losses he suffered and his pursuit of the Decadent ideal.
In 1902, Symons published a selection of his earlier verse as Poems. He translated from the Italian of Gabriele D'Annunzio The Dead City (1900) and The Child of Pleasure (1898), and from the French of Émile Verhaeren The Dawn (1898). To The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1905) he prefixed an essay on the deceased poet, who was a kind of English Verlaine and had many attractions for Symons.
In early 1908, Symons received news that a translated version of his play Tristan and Iseult: A Play in Four Acts (1917) was to be put on in Italy. Symons and his wife decided to tour Europe that autumn. While in Venice, Symons began to become overstimulated and feverish, and soon left his wife behind while travelling between several different hotels around the region. His letters to friends and family were vastly different from his previous work. After wandering lost through the countryside for two days, suffering fatigue and symptoms of madness, he was found and arrested by two Italian soldiers and held in prison in Ferrara. His wife soon located him, and within a few months he was transferred from an Italian ward to a doctor's care back in England.
After Symons' Psychosis breakdown, he published little new work for more than twenty years. His wife Rhoda took over the management of his affairs. His Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930) describes his breakdown and treatment.
Most of Symons' work as a critic was published between 1903 and 1906 in publications such as Weekly Critical Review, the Saturday Review, and Outlook. In 1925, Symons published his book, Studies on Modern Painters, using many of the articles he wrote for Weekly Critical Review and Outlook.
In 1918, Vanity Fair magazine published Symons' Baudelarian essay, "The Gateway to an Artificial Paradise: The Effects of Hashish and Opium Compared." On one occasion between 1889 and 1895, John Addington Symonds, Ernest Dowson, and "some of Symons' lady friends from the ballet all tried hashish during an afternoon tea given by Symons in his rooms at Fountain Court."Munro, John M., Arthur Symons, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1969.
His wife died in Tenterden, Kent, in 1936; Symons likely died in the same house (Island Cottage, Back Street, Kingsgate) in 1945.GRO records accessible via Freebmd.org.uk
His criticisms of French artists spread to the upcoming artists, influencing W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. Symons strived to internationalize English literature and culture. He translated many international authors' works. Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio was the main focus of Symons' translations, as both authors used decadent devices.
Symons contributed poems and essays to The Yellow Book. He later compiled his short essays from 1899–1919 in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which examines Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Mérimée, and earlier authors such as Gérard de Nerval. Though he does not directly define symbolism in his introduction, he portrays it as a movement. Symons also created The Decadent Movement in Literature which was published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in November 1893, where he claims decadence is the most representative literature of the day.
English poet Robert Browning is another writer from whom Symons drew inspiration. Like Pater, his style is replicated in Days and Nights. Symon's earliest published essay is An Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886) and, like the essay about Pater, it delves into Browning's poetry in an analytical light while simultaneously praising his language and his capturing of the human experience.
In September 1989, Symons took his to Paris, where he became an admirer and friend of Paul Verlaine. He wrote more articles on Verlaine than on any other literary figure, translated a large body of his work, dedicated London Nights to him, "en temoignage d'amitie et d'admiration", and worked with William Rothenstein to organize a lecture tour in England for Verlaine. Symons found Verlaine's poetry to most effectively achieve decadent ideals. According to Symons, Verlaine accomplishes "fixing the last fine shade, the quintessence of things, to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul". Symons' poetry in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) demonstrates Verlaine's influence in tone and style. Symons writes with a "melancholic, faintly ironic tone" and uses poetic techniques similar to Verlaine's, including internal rhyme, alliteration, word repetition, constant shifting of accent and stress, and enjambment.
Symons is also cited as having kickstarted Sarojini Naidu's career as a poet. In 1904, Symons published her poems when she was unable to. He also wrote the introduction to her first published collection of poems, The Golden Threshold (1905).
Samuel Chew, another contemporary, considered Symons' poetry and the Decadent movement on a whole to be "morbid", "perverse", and "unwholesome".
In his article, "Arthur Symons as Poet: Theory and Practice", John M. Munro considers the poems of Symons' first published collection, Days and Nights, as "more in the nature of literary exercises than finished works of art". Munro also suggests that the poems could have been written by "anyone with a modicum of sensibility and an aptitude for rhyme". He asserts that Symons had not yet found his poetic voice at this time. However, Munro notes that, with the publication of Silhouettes, Symons began to write in a more decadent tone. He claims that while Symons remains dependent on literary models, his influences of Baudelaire and Robert Browning transition to Paul Verlaine.
Critic Arnold B. Sklare wrote that Symons' book " Confessions is awful.... Confessions, together with a large body of criticism and poetry produced between 1913 and 1935, reveal that a sensitive and highly speculative mind experienced a wound which had never wholly healed".Sklare, Arnold B. "Arthur Symons: An Appreciation of the Critic of Literature" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 9, No. 4 (June 1951), p. 316.
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