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Decadents, Symbolists, Anti-Decadents
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A facsimile reprint in the Decadents.... series, edited by R.K.R.Thornton ISBN 1 85477 162 0 174 x 110 mm 130 pages |
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS The Wind among the Reeds 1899 The 1890s ended with two works of importance for Symbolism, The Wind among the Reeds, and Arthur Symons's influential Symbolist Movement in Literature. Yeats’s volume, which includes copious notes, marks a significant transition in his poetical transition from decadence to sceptical maturity, and marks a high point in his mystical and Celtic preoccupations. Symons’s prose helps to make sense of what are often strange and obscure poems, pointing to ways in which they should be read. £25 $43 [Symbolism] is all an attempt to spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric, the old bondage of exteriority. Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked, magically ... In speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it [literature] becomes a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of a sacred ritual. |
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