SOURCE: "Was Sir Walter Scott a Poet?" in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XCIV, No. 5, November, 1904, pp. 664-69.

Symons was a critic, poet, dramatist, short story writer, and editor who first gained notoriety in the 1890s as an English decadent. Eventually, he established himself as one of the most important critics of the modern era. Symons provided his English contemporaries with an appropriate vocabulary with which to define the aesthetic of symbolism in his book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899); furthermore, he laid the foundation for much of modern poetic theory by discerning the importance of the symbol as a vehicle by which a "hitherto unknown reality was suddenly revealed. " Here, he argues that the qualities often praised in Scott's verse—narrative and description—have little to do with quality poetry. Symons also compares Scott's work to that of other poets, including Homer and Geoffrey Chaucer, and finds Scott's...