SOURCE: Peschel, Enid Rhodes. Introduction to Four French Symbolist Poets: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel, pp. 1-65. Athens, Oh.: Ohio University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Peschel explores attempts by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé to create a new, Symbolist language of poetic utterance.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term “Art,” I should call it “the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.”

Poe, “The Veil of the Soul”

In its strictest historical sense, symbolism describes the French and Belgian writers of the late nineteenth century who, rejecting realism, tried to suggest ideas, emotions and attitudes by using symbolic words, figures and objects. Around 1885 to 1895, they produced manifestoes, sponsored literary reviews, met in various literary groups and discussed points of artistic doctrine. But as several notable critics have shown, symbolism has a much...