Knowra French Symbolism French Symbolism French Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century literary movement that used suggestion, musicality, and symbolic imagery to evoke ideas and feelings rather than state them directly.
Symbolist Manifesto : Jean Moréas’s 1886 essay that named and defined Symbolism as a literary movement. It states the movement’s preference for ideas suggested through images over ideas declared outright.
Charles Baudelaire : A French poet whose work helped shape modern poetry and influenced Symbolism. His theory of correspondences and poems such as “Correspondances” became foundations for Symbolist thought.
Parnassianism : A nineteenth-century French poetic movement that prized formal control and impersonal craftsmanship. Symbolists inherited Parnassian precision but turned from its finished surfaces toward inner suggestion.
Poetry : Literary writing that uses patterned language, rhythm, sound, or imagery for expressive effect. French Symbolism developed chiefly through poems designed to evoke rather than narrate or explain.
Modernist poetry : Poetry associated with early twentieth-century experiments in form, language, and perspective. Modernist poets inherited Symbolist attention to sound, image, and the limits of direct statement.
Synesthesia : A blending of sensory experiences, such as associating colors with sounds. Symbolist poets used cross-sensory correspondences to make language suggest more than it described.
Stéphane Mallarmé : A French poet known for compressed, allusive verse and experiments with poetic form. His writing and Thursday gatherings in Paris helped define Symbolism’s difficult, suggestive poetics.
Decadent movement : A late nineteenth-century European cultural movement associated with artifice, excess, and cultural decline. Decadent writing overlapped with Symbolism in its rejection of ordinary realism and taste.
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance : Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, which uses typography and spatial arrangement as part of its form. It carries Symbolist suggestion into the visual layout of the printed page.
Imagism : An early twentieth-century poetic movement that favored precise images and economical language. Imagists shared Symbolist respect for images but often sought greater clarity and concision.
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