ABSTRACT
Through the prism of a Dionysian–Apollonian paradigm,Kostas Boyiopoulos investigates Arthur Symons’s imagery of Judeo-Christian mythology in Lesbia and Other Poems (1920), Love’s Cruelty (1923) and Jezebel Mort (1931) to show the highly subjective and personal nature of Symons’s poetic voice, juxtaposed with T. S. Eliot’s ‘depersonalisation’. In a lingering post-Romantic subjectivity, Symons’s late verse is that of Satanic posturing, self-mirroring and embodying the object of desire. The myth of Original Sin becomes a narrative framework through which Symons wrestles with postlapsarian sexuality in its alternation between mysteriousness and crassness as he strives to comprehend and control his fractured selfhood.
