ABSTRACT
Arthur Symons also had a considerable part in the associated revival of interest in Donne and the Jacobean dramatic poets. There is an amusing contrast between Yeats’s portrait of Verlaine and that of the man who best understood these relationships, and to whom Yeats owed much of his knowledge of French aesthetic, Arthur Symons. Symons did well to mention the connexion between Magic and Symbolism early. It is an important one, by no means as isolated from the concerns of modern poetry as might appear. For Symons, the movement is essentially a revolution against “the contemplation and rearrangement of material things” considered as normal art. Symons welcomed the novels of Huysmans, partly because they tended to prove that Symbolism could ‘make sense’; he would not have been surprised that the novel has, in some ways, had more success than poetry in post-Symbolist times.
