Symbolism in poetry

K S Sivakumaran

Modern English Poetry of the last century was mainly dominated by two individuals. One was Irishman William Butler Yeats and the other American Thomas Sterne Eliot who moved later to England.

The latter was also one of the influential literary critics and a verse dramatist. Both Yeats and Eliot had something in common. They used a mode called symbolism in their poetry. They had their roots in symbolism – the poetic school of the latter part of the19th Century in France.

The Symbolists paid attention to the words whereas the Imagists were concerned of things. The notion among symbolists was that there is ‘an inner reality to the world of which things that we perceive with our eyes and ears are merely a symbol, and which poetry enables us to penetrate’. Therefore the Symbolists were a kind of seers or mystics. For them any concrete thing was really a symbol.

Marxist critics would not accept the French Symbolist poet Mallarme’s view that the poet would not and should not concern himself with social, political or moral problems. We learn that the “Symbolist Movement was a movement of revolt against the positivist and materialistic tendencies of the 19th Century life and of mid-19th Century theories of art and literature”

More than a century ago Yeats wrote about the ‘Symbolism of Poetry’ that explains what Symbolism was meant to be. The Symbolists felt that ideas themselves are alien to poetry and wanted music and dance, which play an important part in poetry.

However, Symbolism became out dated even at the beginning of the last century. Ezra Pound, another American poet who lived in England disliked Symbolism.