ABSTRACT
Symbolism was officially born on 18 September 1886, when Jean MORé as published the Manifesto of Symbolism in Le Figaro. The most famous theorist of Symbolism, Paul Valéry, in his attempts to explain the phenomenon, came up with more than fifty definitions of Symbolism, which highlights the impossibility of the task. Symbolism would be a matter of moral or spiritual attitude, and not a question of movement, leaders, or aesthetic rules. The birth of Aestheticism is often said to coincide with the publication of Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin in 1835. Symbolism was an attempt to create or conjure up what we might call a supra-natural world, a fore-world, through the power of evocation, whereas Parnassians, by using traditional allegories, wanted to produce a learned poetry. The most famous characters of Symbolist mythology have in common an intrinsic mysterious quality, which mainly relies on the fact that something uncanny makes them both human and inhuman.
