Arthur Symons

 

 

Mr. Henley's Poetry.

 

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THE book of poems which Mr. Henley has just published, remarkable in itself and for its own merits, is also in some sort a manifesto. For a man of such active and eager temperament, a writer of such intellectual vivacity, Mr. Henley's literary baggage is singularly small. It consists of two volumes of verse, a volume of prose criticisms, some essays about painting, and one or two plays written in collaboration with Mr. Stevenson. To these we should perhaps add the National Observer, a weekly paper written in collaboration with a number of clever young men. Five years ago Mr. Henley's name was practically unknown. Journalists knew him as a clever journalist, and that was all. It was only by an accident that the editor (at that time) of the Magazine of Art, the brilliant reviewer of the Athenæum, was discovered by the general public in the character of a poet. The accident was somewhat curious. In 1887 a volume of Ballades and Rondeaus appeared in the Canterbury Series under the editorship of Mr. Gleeson White. It was a collection of all the tolerable work in French forms that could be found in English and American literature, and its consequence (for our salvation) was such an indigestion of ingenuity that scarce a ballade, scarce a rondeau, has seen the light since its publication. As a curiosity the book had its interest; containing, as it did, some of the splendid work of Mr. Swinburne, the exquisite work of Mr. Dobson, it could not but have its value; but, after all, the main interest and value of the book lay in some five-and-thirty pieces signed W. E. Henley. Mr. Gleeson White explained in his preface that he had discovered these pieces in a society paper called London, – a paper which had two years of a very vived existence during 1877-78 – and that he had made his selection without the slightest idea that they were all by one author, and that author Mr. Henley. Written in the artificial forms of the ballade, the rondeau, the villanelle, they stood out from a mass of work, mainly artificial in substance as in form, by the freshness of their inspiration, the joyous individuality of their note. One felt that here was a new voice, and a voice with capacities for a better kind of singing. It was in answer to a demand which would take no denying – and how rarely does the British public ever make such demand! – that A Book of Verses appeared in the following year. It was a complete success – welcomed by the critics, talked about in the drawing-rooms, even bought for ready-money. In 1890 a volume of Views and Reviews was received with much curiosity, as a challenge that [183] at all events had to be considered. Last year the play of Beau Austin (the work of Mr. Henley and Mr. Stevenson) was the literary sensation of the dramatic year, and, though not exactly a success on the boards, must be admitted to have presented to us the finest piece of comedy in action since The School for Scandal. And now The Song of the Sword comes, another challenge, and, as I have said, in some sort a manifesto.

There is something revolutionary about all Mr. Henley's work; but it is in his poetry that the stirrings of a new element have worked to most effectual issues. This new volume of poems, by its very existence, is a vigorous challenge, a notable manifesto, on behalf of a somewhat new art – the art of modernity in poetry. Based on the same principles as A Book of Verses, it developes those principles yet further, and, in the "London Voluntaries" particularly, and in such poems as the second, twenty-second, and twenty-fourth of the "Rhymes and Rhythms," succeeds to a remarkable degree in working out a really modern art of verse. "We are not worthy of our matchless London," I have just been reading in a sonnet, not by Mr. Henley; and this is how Mr. Henley answers the general indictment: –

" Forth from the dust and din,
  The crush, the heat, the many-spotted glare
  The odour and sense of life and lust aflere,
  The wrangle and jangle of unrests,
  Let us take horse, dear heart, take horse and win –
  As from swart August to the green lap of May –
  To quietness and the fresh and fragrant breasts
  Of the still, delicious night.
              .     .     .     .     .

"Through street and square, through square and street,
  Each with his home grown quality of dark
  And violated silence, loud and fleet,
  Waylaid by a merry ghost at every lamp,
  The hansom wheels and plunges.   Hark, O hark,
  Sweet, how the old mare's bit and chain
  Ring back a rough refrain
  Upon the marked and cheerful tramp
  Of her four shoes!   Here is the Park,
  And O the languid midsummer wafts adust,
  The tired midsummer blooms!
  O the mysterious distances, the glooms
  Romantic, the august
  And solemn shapes!

" . . . . And lo! the wizard hour
  Whose shining, silent sorcery hath such power!
  Still, still the streets, between their carcanets
  Of linking gold, are avenues of sleep:
  But see how gable-ends and parapets
  In gradual beauty and significance
  [184] Emerge!   And did you hear
  That little twitter-and-cheep,
  Breaking inordinately loud and clear
  On this still, spectral, exquisite atmosphere?
  'Tis a first nest at matins!   And behold
  A rakehell cat – how furtive and a-cold!
  A spent which homing from some infamous dance –
  Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
  Through shadowy railings into a bit of shade!
  And lo! a little wind and sky,
  The smell of ships (that earnest of romance),
  A sense of space and water, and thereby
  A lamp-lit bridge ouching the troubled sky,
  And look, O look! a tangle of silver gleams
  And dusky lights, our River and all his dreams,
  His dreams of a dead past that cannot die!"

Is not this, which I take from the first of the "London Voluntaries," almost as fine as a Whistler? – instinct with the same sense of the poetry of cities, the romance of what lies beneath our eyes, if we only have the vision and the point of view. Here, at last, is a poet who can so enlarge the limits of his verse as to take in London. And I think that might be the test of poetry which professes to be modern – its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there, indoors and out.

To be modern in poetry – to represent really oneself and one's surroundings, the world as it is to-day – to be modern and yet poetical, is, perhaps, the most difficult as it is certainly the most interesting of all artistic achievements. In music the modern soul seems to have found expression in Wagner; in painting it seems to have taken form and colour in Whistler and Degas; in sculpture it seems to have found an exponent in Rodin; on the stage it is certainly typified in Sarah Bernhardt. Essentially modern poetry may be said to have commenced in France, with Baudelaire. The art which he invented – a perverse, self-scrutinizing, troubled art of sensation and nerves, has been yet further developed, subtilised – volatilised, rather, by Verlaine. Verlaine, indeed, remains at the present the typical modern poet. In England we find the first suggestions of a really modern conception of poetical art in some of the smaller and finer poems of Browning. Mr. George Meredith's Modern Lore almost realizes an ideal. The poem stands alone in the literature of its time; moving by "tragic hints," moving to the measure of an irony that achieves a quite new expression in song, it gives voice – in that acid, stinging, bitter-sweet style fashioned out of the very moods of these modern lovers – to all that is new, troubled, unexpressed, in the convolutions of passion, all that is strange, novel, and unexpected, in the accidents of passionate situation, among our sophisticated lovers to-day. In quite another way Mr. Coventry Patmore has achieved wonders, not in the domes[185]tic Angel, but in the less popular and immeasurably superior Unknown Eros, by working, with that extraordinarily delicate touch of his, on the emotions and destinies of the more spiritual kind of love, which is no less, in essentails and accidentals alike, "modern love." Had Walt Whitman only possessed the art, as he possessed, and at times revealed, the soul of poetry, it is possible that in him we should have found the typical modern poet. But his work remains a suggestion, not an accomplishment. In James Thomson we find a violent and inconsiderate attempt to deal with modern themes, often in a somewhat old-fashioned way. He was a man of genius who never found the right utterance, but his endeavour was in the right direction. He indeed aimed at doing much of what Mr. Henley seems to me to have actually done.

To some of the writers I have named, and to some others, Mr. Henley owes not a little. The style of the "Hospital Sonnets" is founded on the style of Modern Lore; both from the rhymed and unrhymed poems in irregular metres, it is evident that Mr. Henley has learnt something from the odes of the Unknown Eros; there are touches of Walt Whitman, some of the notes of Heine; there is, too, something of the exquisitely disarticulated style of Verlaine. But with all this assimilation of influences that are in the air, Mr. Henley has developed for himself a style that becomes in the highest degree personal, and one realises behind it a most vigorous, distinct, and interesting personality. Alike as a human document, and as an artistic experiment, the "rhymes and rhythms" named "In Hospital" have a peculiar value. Dated from the Old Edinburgh Infirmary, 1873-75, they tell the story of life in hospital, from the first glimpse of the "tragic meanness" of stairs and corridors, through the horrors of the operation, by way of visitors, doctors, and patients, to the dizzy rapture of the discharge, the freedom of wind, sunshine, and the beautiful world. The poet to whom such an experience has come, the man, perhaps, whom such an experience has made a poet, must be accounted singularly fortunate. Of the man who rhyme, so large a number are cursed with suburban comforts. A villa and books never made a poet; they do but tend to the building up of the respectable virtues; and for the respectable virtues poetry has but the slightest use. To roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless, and improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing; to live, as well as to observe life; or, to be shut up in hospital, drawn out of the rapid current of life into a sordid and exasperating inaction – to wait, for a time, in the anteroom of death: it is such things as these that make for poetry. Just as those months in prison had their influence upon Verlaine, bringing out in his work a deeper note than even the passionate experi[186]ences of early life had fashioned, so that hospital experience has had its influence upon Mr. Henley. The very subject, to begin with, was a discovery. Here is poetry made out of personal sensations, poetry which is half physiological, poetry which is pathology – and yet essentially poetry. It is one of the modern discoveries that "the dignity of the subject" is a mere figure of speech, and a misleading one. See what Mr. Whistler can make out of "Brock's Benefit:" in place of fireworks and vulgarity you have a harmony in black and gold, and a work of art. See what Degas can discover for you in the crossing of colours, the violent rhythm of movements, the crowded and empty spaces of a ballet rehearsal. And so, in place of prattling about Phyllis, Mr. Henley has set himself to the task of rendering the more difficult poetry of the disagreeable. And in these wonderful poems – the sonnets and the "rhythms," as he calls his unrhymed verse – he has etched a series of impressions which are like nothing else that I know in poetry. What a triumph of remembered and recorded sensation is this picture, for instance, "The Operation": –

" You are carried in a basket,
      Like a carcass from the shambles,
      To the theatre, a cockpit
      Where they stretch you on a table.

" Then they bid you close your eyelids,
      And they mask you with a napkin,
      And the anæsthetic reaches
      Hot and subtle through your being.

" And you gasp and reel and shudder
      In a rushing, swaying rapture,
      While the voices at your elbow
      Fade – receding – fainter – farther.

" Lights about you shower and tumble,
      And your blood seems crystallising –
      Edged and vibrant, yet within you
      Racked and hurried back and forward.

" Then the lights grow fast and furious,
      And you hear a noise of waters,
      And you wrestle, blind and dizzy,
      In a agony of effort,

" Till a sudden lull accepts you,
      And you sound an utter darkness . . .
      And awaken . . . with a struggle . . .
      On a hushed, attentive audience."

Then there are the long nights of lying awake, the restlessness of the tumbled bed, the sound of a leaking cistern when, "at the barren heart of midnight," it "taps upon the heartstrings:" [187] the long days of wondering at the spring through one's prison windows, with only the change of a new patient brought in – the man who had tried to cut his throat, the man whose spine was broken – or occasionally a visitor, the "Apparition" (who, we know, was Mr. Stevenson), the "Interlude" of a New Year's frolic among the patients. It is all there, and the impression is conveyed to us by what one can only describe as a new process.

"In Hospital" gives us one side of Mr. Henley's talent, and it throws a vived light on the conditions under which so much brave work has been done. For Mr. Henley, of all the poets of the day, is the most strenuously certain that life is worth living, the most eagerly defiant of fate, the most heroically content with death. There is, indeed, something of the spirit of Walt Whitman in his passion for living, his acceptance of the hour when man,

" Tired of experience, turns
  To the friendly and comforting breast
  Of the old nurse, Death."

His special "note," in the earlier work particularly, is a manly Bohemianism, a refreshingly freckless joy in the happy accidents of existence. Always insistently modern, with such fine use of "handsoms," if "fifth-floor-windows," of bathers that "bob," of "washer-maids," in the midst of "a shower of suds," he has set some of the most human of emotions to a music that is itself curiously modern: –

" There is a wheel inside my head
      Of wantonness and wine,
          A cracked old fiddle is grunting without;
  But the wind with scents of the sea is fed,
      And the sun seems glad to shine.

" The sun and the wind are akin to you,
      As you are akin to June;
          But the fiddle! . . . it giggles and buzzes about,
  And, love and laughter! who gave him the cue? –
      He's playing your favourite tune."

There is a snatch, a jingle, which, slight as one may call it, seems to me to give a particular, well-known, hardly defined sensation with wonderful success. It is a sensation which is so vague in itself, so vague and delicious, a frivolous, an inconstant, an inconsequent sensation, born of chance and happy idleness, and a pleasent and unimportant memory, that to render it requires a more genuine attack of what we call inspiration than I know not how many fine, sober-pacing sonnets, marching to order. Songs like this, and like so many of Mr. Henley's, are only possible to a rare union of a very special temperament (more often found in people who are not writers) and a very special artistic endowment. There are poets who could express everything if they could only feel anything; others who feel [188] acutely, but can never give out in poetry what they have received in sensation. Perhaps the typical example of the latter was the late Lord Lytton. A diplomatist, a man of the world, a traveller, he was a diligent student of life, a man of many capacities, many adventures, with infinite opportunities and the keenest desire to profit by them. His personal appreciation of the human comedy was immense; his own part in it was constant, considerable, and to himself always an exitement. Yet, after all, he was never able to strike the personal note in verse: it is only from some stray suggestion that one divines the genuine emotion that has doubtless really awakened this music which he plays to us with studied fingers on a borrowed lute. A large part of contemporary verse is, of course, concerned with quite other issues, does not even try to do the one thing worth doing, the one thing left to be done. This, which Mr. Stevenson has done in prose, Mr. Henley has done in verse. One might call it personal romance, the romance of oneself – just what nine-tenths of the world never discover at all, even for private use. I feel a bourgeois solemnity in much of the really quite good, the very respectable work in verse that is done now-a-days – bourgeois, for all its distinctions, of a kind. Our fine craftsmen are aghast at passion, afraid of emotion, ashamed of frivolity; only anxious that the sentiment as well as the rhyme should be right. It is the bourgeois, perhaps I should say the genteel, point of view: poetry from the clubs for the clubs. I am inclined to believe that no good poetry was ever written in a club arm-chair. Something in the air of those ponderous institutions seems to forbid the exercise of so casual a freak as verse. And with Mr. Henley it is indeed casual – casual as one's moods, sensations, caprices; casual as the only aspect of fate that we can see.

To say this is not to deny to Mr. Henley any of the deeper qualities of song. His outlook on life is joyous, in spite of misfortune; his outlook on destiny and death is grave, collected, welcoming: –

" Crosses and troubles a-many have proved me.
  One or two women (God bless them!) have loved me.
  I have worked and dreamed, and I've talked at will.
  Of art and drink I have had my fill.
  I've comforted here, I've succoured there.
  I've faced my foes, and I've backed my friends.
  I've blundered, and sometimes made amends.
  I have prayed for light, and I've known despair.
  Now I look before, as I look behind,
  Come storm, come shine, whatever befall,
  With a gratefull heart and a constant mind,
  For the end I know is the best of all."

There is a sort of epilogue, or last will and testament, and it is very explicit. Prizing in life much that is merely delightful and [189] the charm of passing moments, what he prizes most of all is the emotion of vital deeds, the passion of love, of patriotism –

" What have I done for you,
    England, my England?
  What is there I would not do,
    England, my own?" –

the vived sense of life "at the very top of being." To quote some of his own words, it is "the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion – to a cause, an ideal, a passion even – the dignity of resistence, the sacred quality of patriotism."

The most terrible poem in the new volume – a poem which may be compared and contrasted at once with Mr. Rudyard Kipling's "Tomlinson" – tells the tale of "deeds undone that hunger for their due," the rejection of death and the grave, and the frightful triumph of the worm: –

" And writhing, fain
  And like a lover, he his fill shall take
  Where no triumphant memory lives to make
  His obscene victory vain."

"The Song of the Sword," the splendidly eloquent "voice of the sword from the heart of the sword," is a hymn to the ecstasy of conflict, the quickening forces that advance the world: –

" Ho! then, the Trumpet,
  Handmaid of heroes,
  Calling the peers
  To the place of espousal.
  Ho! then, the splendour
  And sheen of my ministry,
  Clothing the earth
  With the livery of lightnings!
  Ho! then, the music
  Of battles in onset,
  And ruining armours,
  And God's gift returning
  In fury to God!
  Glittering and keen
  As the song of the winter stars.
  Ho! then, the sound
  Of my voice, the implacable
  Angel of Destiny! –
  I am the sword."

He is ashamed of none of the natural human instincts, and writes of women like a man, without effeminacy and without offence, content to be at one with the beneficent seasons, the will of nature. And has he not written, once and for all, the song of the soul of man in the shadow of the unknown? Such a song is the equivalent of a great deed.

" [190] Out of the night that covers me,
    Black as the pit from pole to pole,
  I thank whatever gods may be
    For my unconquerable soul.

" In the fell clutch of circumstance
    I have not winced nor cried aloud.
  Under the bludgeonings of chance
    My head is bloody, but unbowed.

" Beyond this place of wrath and tears
    Looms but the Horror of the shade,
  And yet the menace of the years
    Finds and shall find me unafraid.

" It matters not how straight the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
  I am the master of my fate,
    I am the captain of my soul."

I began by quoting from the "London Voluntaries," and I find myself returning to the "London Voluntaries" as perhaps the most individual, the most characteristically modern, and the most entirely successful of Mr. Henley's work in verse. Here the subject is the finest of modern subjects, the pageant of London. Intensely personal in the feeling that transfuses the picture, it is with a brush of passionate impressionism that he paints for us the London of midsummer nights, London at "the golden end" of October afternoons, London cowering in winter under the Wind-Fiend "out of the poisonous east," London in all the ecstasy of spring. The style is freer, the choice of words, the direction of rhythms, more sure, the language more select and effectual in eloquence, than elsewhere. There is no eccentricity in rhythm, no experimentalising, nothing tentative. There is something classical – a note of Lycidas – in these most modern of poems, almost as if modernity had become classical. The outcome of many experiments, they have passed beyond that stage into the stage of existence.

Revolutionary always, Mr. Henley has had a wholesome but perilous discontent with the conventions of language and of verse. He is an artist who is also a critic, and the book of Views and Reviews, striking on its own account, has its value also in illustration of his artistic principles, preferences, and innovations. That book – "less a book," the author tells us, "than a mosaic of scraps and shreds recovered from the shot rubbish of some fourteen years of journalism" – shows us an active and varied intelligence, precipitately concerned with things in general, very emphatic in likes and dislikes, never quite dispassionately, always acutely, honestly, eagerly. His characteristics of feeling and expression, and not any reasoned or prejudiced partiality, make him the champion or the foe of every writer with whom he concerns himself. Brilliant, original, pictorial, his style tires by its pungency, dazzles by its glitter. Every word must [191] be emphatic, every stroke must score heavily, every sentence must be an epigram or a picture or a challange. With a preference, he tells us, for the "unobtrusive graces," for "tranquil writing," for "eloquence without adjectives," he is consistent in his negation of all these ideals of the urbane style. And, with this, immense cleverness, an acuteness that pierces and delights to pierce, an invention of phrases that is often of the essence of criticism, an extensive knowledge, extensive sympathies. His vocabulary is unusually large, and it is used, too recklessly indeed, but in a surprisingly novel, personal way. Turning to the poems, we find that the artist in verse is far more careful than the craftsman in prose, and that here he has curbed himself to a restraint in the debauch of coloured and sounding words, still sufficiently coloured and sounding for an equally novel and personal effect. What Mr. Henley has brought into the language of poetry is a certain freshness, a daring straightforwardness and pungency of epithet, very refreshing in contrast with the traditional limpness and timidity of the respectable verse of the day. One feels indeed at times that the touch is a little rough, the voice a trifle loud, the new word just a little unnecessary. But with these unaccustomed words and tones Mr. Henley does certainly succeed in flashing the picture, the impression upon us, in realising the intangible, in saying new things in a new and fascinating manner. Here, for instance, in the recent volume, is an impression of night and the sea, in their mood of deadly companionship, which has never, I think, been rendered more vigorously, more authentically, in verse: –

" A desolate shore,
  The sinister seduction of the moon,
  The menace of the irreclaimable sea.

" Flaunting, tawdry and grim,
  From cloud to cloud along her beat,
  Leering her battered and inveterate leer,
  She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,
  Her horrible old man,
  Mumbling old oaths and warming
  His villainous old bones with villainous talk –
  The secrets of their grisly housekeeping
  Since they went out upon the pad
  In the first twilight of self-conscious Time:
  Growling, obscene and hoarse,
  Tales of unnumbered ships,
  Goodly and strong, companions of the Advance,
  In some vile alley of the night
  Waylaid and bludgeoned –
  Dead.

" Deep cellared in primeval ooze,
  Ruined, dishonoured, spoiled,
  They lie where the lean water-worm
  Crawls free of their secrets, and their broken sides
  Bulge with the slime of life.   Thus they abide
  [192] Thus fouled and desecrate,
  The summons of the Trumpet, and the while
  These Twain, their murderers,
  Unravined, imperturbable, unsubdued,
  Hang at the heels of their children – she aloft
  As in the shining streets,
  He as in ambush at some fetid stair.

" The stalwart ships,
  The beautiful and bold adventurers!
  Stationed out yonder in the isle,
  The tall Policeman,
  Flashing his bull's-eye, as he peers
  About him in the ancient vacancy,
  Tells them this way is safety – this way home."

This poem, with others of Mr. Henley's "rhythms," seems to me so fine, so satisfying, that I am fain to wonder whether it is an unreasonable prejudice that inclines me to question the wisdom of doing without rhyme in measures that seem to demand it. The experiment has been made by Heine, by Matthew Arnold, and undoubtedly with a certain measure of success. But to do without rhyme is to do without one of the beauties of poetry, I should say one of the inherent beauties. Our ears are so accustomed to it that they have come to require it, and it is certain, for one thing, that no rhymeless lyric could become really popular, and extremely likely, for another, that an innovation which begins by dropping rhyme will end by abandoning rhythm. It has been tried in France, persistently, most ingeniously, never, I think, successfully. The example of the French Décadents should be a warning to those in England who are anxious to loosen the bonds of verse. Everything that can be done has been done: there are treatises on poetical orchestration as well as examples of it: there is a Pélerin Passionné and its little fame to boast of. Yet the really great, the really modern poet of France – the leader, as they would fain hail him, of the noisy little school of Décadents, the brainsick little school of Symbolistes, has always held aloof from these extravagances, and he has given his opinion very frankly on those young confrères who reproach him "with having kept a metre, and in this metre some cæsura, and rhymes at the end of the lines. Mon Dieu!" he adds, "I thought I had 'broken' verse quite sufficiently." Yet, supposing even that one admits the legitimacy of the experiment, is not the inexpediency of it somewhat strongly indicated by the deeper impressiveness, the more certain mastery of the "London Voluntaries" which are rhymed? There surely, is Mr. Henley's perfectly satisfactory work, his entirely characteristic rendering of modern subject-matter in appropriate form. A new subject, an individual treatment, a form which retains all that is helpful in tradition, while admitting all that is valuable in experiment: that, I think, is modernity becoming classical.

 

 

 

 

Erstdruck und Druckvorlage

The Fortnightly Review.
1892, August, S. 182-192.

Gezeichnet: ARTHUR SYMONS.

Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck (Editionsrichtlinien).


The Fortnightly Review   online
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The Fortnightly Review   inhaltsanalytische Bibliographie
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
Hrsg. von Walter E. Houghton. Bd. 2. Toronto 1972.

 

 

Zeitschriften-Repertorium

 

Aufgenommen in

 

 

 

Werkverzeichnis


Verzeichnis

Beckson, Karl u.a.: Arthur Symons.
A Bibliography.
Greensboro, NC: ELT Press 1990.



Symons, Arthur: Days and Nights.
London: Macmillan and Co. and New York 1889.
URL: https://archive.org/details/cu31924013557099
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015065540141

Symons, Arthur: Silhouettes.
London: Matthews & Lane 1892.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175004094424
S. 13: Pastel.

Symons, Arthur: Paul Verlaine.
In: The National Review.
Bd. 19, 1892, Nr. 112, Juni, S. 501-515.
URL: https://archive.org/details/nationalreview1918unse
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006061855

Symons, Arthur: Mr. Henley's Poetry.
In: The Fortnightly Review.
1892, August, S. 182-192.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008882609
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006056638
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/715786-1
URL: https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php

Symons, Arthur: The Decadent Movement in Literature.
In: Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
Bd. 87, 1893, Nr. 522, November, S. 858-867.
URL: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=harpers
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008919716
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008882057
URL: https://www.unz.com/print/Harpers

Symons, Arthur: Paul Verlaine.
In: The New Review.
1893, Dezember, S. 609-617.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007916511
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000060795
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008884955

Symons, Arthur: London Nights.
London: Smithers 1895.
URL: https://archive.org/details/londonnights00symogoog
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3576649

Symons, Arthur: Silhouettes.
Second edition. Revised and enlarged.
London: Smithers; New York: Richmond 1896.
URL: https://archive.org/details/cu31924013557172
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044086852514

Symons, Arthur: Studies in Two Literatures.
London: Smithers 1897.
URL: https://archive.org/details/cu31924013257666
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hxv997

Symons, Arthur: Mallarmé's "Divagations".
In: The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art.
Bd. 83, 1897, 30. Januar, S. 109-110.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009471062
URL: https://digipress.digitale-sammlungen.de/calendar/newspaper/bsbmult00000691
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/716854-8

Symons, Arthur: Le mysticisme de Maeterlinck.
In: La Revue des Revues.
Bd. 22, 1897, 15. September, S. 531-536.
URL: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344304308/date
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100330880IA

Symons, Arthur: Stéphane Mallarmé
In: The Fortnightly Review.
1898, November, S. 677-685.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008882609
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006056638
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/715786-1
URL: https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php

Symons, Arthur: The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
London: Heinemann 1899.
URL: https://archive.org/details/cu31924027213994
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t3dz0th4k
URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k82456t

Symons, Arthur: Jules Laforgue.
In: Ders., The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
London: Heinemann 1899, S. 105-114.
URL: https://archive.org/details/cu31924027213994
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/coo1.ark:/13960/t3dz0th4k
URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k82456t

Symons, Arthur: Mr. Yeats as a Lyric Poet.
In: The Saturday Review.
Bd. 87, 6. Mai 1899, S. 553-554.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009471062
URL: https://digipress.digitale-sammlungen.de/calendar/newspaper/bsbmult00000691
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/716854-8

Symons, Arthur: A Book of French Verse.
In: Literature. An International Gazette of Criticism.
1899, 10. November, S. 413-414.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/012173307

Symons, Arthur: Ernest Dowson.
In: The Fortnightly Review.
1900, Juni, S. 947-957.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008882609
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006056638
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/715786-1
URL: https://archive.org/advancedsearch.php

Symons, Arthur: What is Poetry?.
In: The Saturday Review.
Bd. 92, 31. August 1901, S. 271-272.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009471062
URL: https://digipress.digitale-sammlungen.de/calendar/newspaper/bsbmult00000691
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/716854-8

Symons, Arthur: Poems.
Bd. 1. New York: John Lane 1902.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/inu.32000000667487

Symons, Arthur: Poems.
Bd. 2. New York: John Lane 1902.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006059461
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.31175016742739

Symons, Arthur: Lyrics.
Portland, Me.: Mosher 1903.
PURL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008973059

Symons, Arthur: Studies in Prose and Verse.
London: Dent; New York: Dutton o.J. [1904].
URL: https://archive.org/details/studiesinprosevesymo00symo
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001775310

Symons, Arthur (Hrsg.): The Poems of Ernest Dowson.
With a Memoir by Arthur Symons, Four Illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and a Portrait by William Rothenstein.
London u. New York: Lane 1905.
URL: https://archive.org/details/poemsernestdows00symogoog
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001775310

Symons, Arthur: Qu'est-ce que la Poésie?
In: Vers et prose.
Bd. 3, 1905, September-November, S. 29-33.
URL: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb34505309x/date
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000642668
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008745696

Symons, Arthur: Studies in Seven Arts.
London: Constable 1906.
URL: https://archive.org/details/studiesinsevenar00symouoft
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015002727173   [New York 1906]

Symons, Arthur: Aspects of Verlaine.
In: The Smart Set. A Magazine of Cleverness.
Bd. 18, 1906, Nr. 1, Januar, S. 79-83.
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008881616

Symons, Arthur: London. A Book of Aspects.
London: Privately printed 1909.
URL: https://archive.org/details/londonbookofaspe00symo
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951002063232p

Symons, Arthur: Plays, Acting and Music. A Book of Theory.
London: Dutton & Company 1909.
URL: https://archive.org/details/playsactingmusic00symo
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015029506477

Symons, Arthur: Art. Goncourt, DE.
In: The Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh Edition.
Volume XII. Cambridge, England; New York 1911, S. 231.
URL: https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabrit12chisrich

Symons, Arthur: Art. Mallarmé, Stéphane.
In: The Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh Edition.
Volume XVII. Cambridge, England; New York 1911, S. 490.
URL: https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabri17chisrich

Symons, Arthur: Art. Verlaine, Paul.
In: The Encyclopædia Britannica. Eleventh Edition.
Volume XXVII. Cambridge, England; New York 1911, S. 1023-1024.
URL: https://archive.org/details/encyclopaediabri27chisrich

Symons, Arthur: Figures of Several Centuries.
London: Constable and Company 1916.
URL: https://archive.org/details/figuresofseveral00symouoft
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5047151   [New York o.J. (1916)]

Symons, Arthur: Colour Studies in Paris.
New York: Dutton & Company 1918.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t09w0c09f
URL: https://archive.org/details/colourstudiesinp01symo

Symons, Arthur: Claude Debussy.
In: The Egoist.
Bd. 5, 1918: Nr. 6, Juni-Juli, S. 82-83; Nr. 7, August, S. 93-94.
URL: https://modjourn.org/journal/egoist/
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000529711

Symons, Arthur: The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
Revised and enlarged edition. New York: Dutton & Company 1919.
URL: https://archive.org/details/symbolistmovemen00symo
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435074352998


Symons, Arthur: Letters to W. B. Yeats, 1892-1902.
Edited by Bruce Morris.
Edinburgh: The Tragara Press 1989.

Symons, Arthur: Selected Letters, 1880-1935.
Edited by Karl Beckson and John M. Munro.
Basingstoke: Macmillan 1989.

Symons, Arthur: Selected Writings.
Edited with an introduction by Roger Holdsworth.
Manchester: Fyfield Books 2003.

Symons, Arthur: The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
Edited by Matthew Creasy.
Manchester: Carcanet 2014.

Duclos, Michèle: Un regard anglais sur le symbolisme français.
Arthur Symons, Le mouvement symboliste en littérature (1899), généalogie, traduction, influence.
Paris: L'Harmattan 2016.

Symons, Arthur: Selected Early Poems.
Edited with an introduction and notes by Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick.
Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association 2017.

Symons, Arthur: Spiritual Adventures.
Edited with an introduction and notes by Nicholas Freeman.
Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association 2017.

Palacio, Jean de (Hrsg.): Trois essais sur la décadence.
Charles Morice, Arthur Symons, Hermann Bahr.
Textes traduits et présentés par Jean de Palacio.
Tusson: Du Lérot 2020.

 

 

 

Literatur: Symons

Bizzotto, Elisa / Evangelista, Stefano-Maria (Hrsg.): Arthur Symons. Poet, Critic, Vagabond. Cambridge 2018.

Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik. In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte. Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping. 2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.

Bristow, Joseph (Hrsg.): The Fin-de-Siècle poem. English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Athens 2005.

Cohen, Edward H.: The Publication and Reception of W. E. Henley's A Book of Verses: "The Diversity of Contemporary Tongues". In: English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 51.2 (2008), S. 184-204.

Fielding, Penny: The Time of W. E. Henley: 'Minor Poetry' and the 1880s. In: The Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition. The 1880s. Hrsg. von Penny Fielding u. Andrew Taylor. Cambridge 2019, S. 80-97.

Fox, C. Jay / Stern, Carol S. / Means, Robert S.: Arthur Symons, Critic Among Critics: An Annotated Bibliography. Greensboro, NC 2007.

Freeman, Nick: Symons, Whistler: The Art of Seeing. In: Decadence and the Senses. Hrsg. von Jane Desmarais u. Alice Condé. Cambridge 2017, S. 15-31.

Hall, Jason D. u.a. (Hrsg.): Decadent Poetics. Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle. New York 2013 (= Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture).



Henley, William Ernest: A Book of Verses. Second Edition. New York: Scribner & Welford 1889.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hwk9sr

Henley, William Ernest: Views and Reviews. Essays in Appreciation. Literature. London: David Nutt 1890.
URL: https://archive.org/details/henleyviewsrevie00henl
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015030743648

Henley, William Ernest: The Song of the Sword and Other Verses. London: David Nutt 1892.
URL: https://archive.org/details/songswordandoth01henlgoog
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015063939600



Pointner, Petra: A Prelude to Modernism. Studies on the Urban and Erotic Poetry of Arthur Symons. Heidelberg 2004 (= Anglistische Forschungen, 339).

Warner, Eric / Hough, Graham (Hrsg.): Strangeness and Beauty. An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910. 2 Bde. Cambridge u.a. 2009.

 

 

Literatur: The Fortnightly Review

Brake, Laurel: The "Wicked Westminster", "The Fortnightly" and Walter Pater's "Renaissance".  In: Literature in the Marketplace. Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices.  Hrsg. von John O'Jordan u. Robert L. Patten. Cambridge 1995, S. 289-305.

Freedman, Linda: Prophecy, Poetry, and Democracy: Teaching through the International Lens of the Fortnightly Review In: Teaching Transatlanticism. Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture. Hrsg. von Linda K. Hughes u.a. Edinburgh 2015, S. 195-208.

King, Andrew / Plunkett, Andrew (Hrsg.): Victorian Print Media. A Reader. Oxford 2005.

King, Andrew u.a. (Hrsg.): The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. London u. New York 2019.

Small, Helen: Liberal Editing in the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century. In: Authorship in Context. From the Theoretical to the Material. Hrsg. von Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay. Basingstoke u.a. 2007, S. 56-71.

Morrisson, Mark S.: The Public Face of Modernism. Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920. Madison, Wis. u.a. 2001.
Kap 1: The Myth of the Whole and Ford's English Review: Edwardian Monthlies, the Mercure de France, and Early British Modernism (S. 17-53); hier: S. 39-48: The Edwardian Reviews: The English Review and the Fortnightly Review.

Palmegiano, E. M.: Perceptions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals. A Bibliography. London u.a. 2012.

Stead, Évanghélia / Védrine, Hélène (Hrsg.): L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930). Réseaux et circulations des modèles. Paris 2018.

 

 

Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer