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In recent years Arthur Symons has been increasingly recognized as an important influence in the development of the modern aesthetic. Not so long ago he was regarded as little more than a typical impressionistic critic and an outmoded, hot-house poet of the decadent 1890s, who somehow lingered on into the mid-twentieth century. Yet W. B. Yeats recorded a generous tribute to Symons in his Autobiography and T. S. Eliot expressed his gratitude to The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)--probably Symons's most important single work--which provided him with an introduction to Laforgue and Rimbaud at a significant moment in his artistic development. More recently, a hitherto unpublished letter of Ezra Pound has appeared, in which he confesses that Symons was one of the writers in whom he found his "sanity," and at least two scholars have demonstrated the importance of Symons as an influence on the early development of James Joyce.
There is no denying that Symons was a typical fin-de-siècle figure; what is interesting about his work, however, is that it demonstrates a progression from decadence to symbolism, a growing refinement of the sensibility, reflecting the famous dictum of the Victorian critic and prose stylist Walter Pater to the effect that all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.
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