The Symbolist Poem: The Development of the English Tradition

The purpose of this unique anthology of over 250 poems and excerpts from prose criticism is to trace the Symbolist tradition in English poetry from Wordsworth to the Moderns, emphasizing the highly significant contribution of the French Symbolists to that tradition by including a generous sampling of translations of their poetry by English poets of the eighties and nineties. "The Symbolist Poem" has six sections: Part I represents the Romantic poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley; Part II represents the "Aesthetic" poetry of Poe, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Swinburne; Part III contains poems in translation by the French Symbolists De Lisle, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Corbière, and Laforgue; Part IV gives some typical "Decadent" poems by Henley, Sharp, Dowson, Binyon, Gosse, Wilde, Symons, and Moore; Part V includes "Post-Symbolists" like Yeats, Sitwell, Stevens, Crane, Auden, and Lowell; and Part VI offers a large selection of critical excerpts on the poets represented in the anthology. The editor, Professor Edward Engelberg of Brandeis University, provides a comprehensive introduction that analyzes the meaning and significance of the Symbolist movement in English literature.