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Of late-nineteenth-century writers of prose, such as Edmund Gosse, George Moore, and George Saintsbury, Arthur Symons has been acknowledged as a crucial figure in the development of Modernism, as the most important disciple of Walter Pater, and as a significant influence on such modernists as William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. He was the most important aesthetic critic who acquainted the British in the 1890s with literary Decadence and the Symbolist Movement (both having developed in France), and he edited the Savoy, the only truly avant-garde periodical in that decade. In short, Symons--a poet, short-story writer, translator, travel writer, playwright, editor, and critic--was the complete man of letters in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries until a severe mental breakdown halted his career for almost two years (1908-1910). Although he recovered slowly to resume his writing, he was permanently altered by an afflicted mind.
Such a literary figure, at the forefront of the artistic renaissance of the 1890s, emerged from an unlikely background and even more unlikely parents.
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