Arthur Symons

’If I have been a vagabond, and have never been able to root myself in any one place in the world, it is because I have no early memories of any one sky or soil. It has freed me from many prejudices in giving me its own unresting kind of freedom; but it has cut me off from whatever is stable, of long growth in the world.’ — Arthur Symons

Arthur Symons (1865-1945) was a central figure in the cultural and social networks of the British fin de siècle. He was an often controversial poet and critic who introduced British readers to French Decadence and Symbolism and had an equally important if largely unacknowledged influence on the development of modernism. In 1908 – the year of a mental breakdown that had a disastrous effect both on his career and posthumous reputation – W.B. Yeats referred to him as ‘the best critic of his generation.’ Symons’s vast body of work also includes fiction and writings on the visual arts, music, theatre and the popular stage, as well as translations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and D’Annunzio. The essays in this volume reflect the breadth of Symons’s interests, reassessing this dynamic writer who played a key mediating role between English and European literatures, and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.