ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some little known prose poems composed by the poet and critic Arthur Symons (most famous for The Symbolist Movement in Literature , 1899) in memory of a much-loved dog named Api. It suggests that Symons’s outpouring of grief is best understood in the context of other canine texts from the turn of the century, specifically those written by “Michael Field” and Maurice Maeterlinck, although Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé are also brought to bear. ‘The Symbolist Dog’ was a transcendent, even supernatural creation, inspired by the experience of living with real animals.
