SYMONS, ARTHUR (WILLIAM)

born Feb. 28, 1865, Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire, Eng. died Jan. 22, 1945, Wittersham, Kent poet and critic, the first English champion of the French Symbolist poets, who sought to convey impressions by suggestion rather than direct statement. Symons' schooling was irregular, but, determined to be a writer, he soon found a place in the London literary journalism of the 1890s. He joined the Rhymers' Club (a group of poets including William Butler Yeats and Ernest Christopher Dowson); contributed to The Yellow Book, an avant-garde journal; and became editor of a new magazine, The Savoy (1896), with Aubrey Beardsley as art editor. Symons was versed in European literature, and his popularizing Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) summed up a decade of interpretation and influenced both Yeats and T.S. Eliot. His criticism constitutes an ambitious attempt to create a general aesthetic from the unsystematized opus of the critic Walter Pater. Symons' poetry is mainly fin de sicle (i.e., disillusioned) in feeling. Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) contain admirable impressionist lyrics, and at his best he is sensitive to the complex moods of urban life. His translations from the French poet Paul Verlaine are notable, and he wrote elegant travel pieces. In 1908 he suffered a severe mental breakdown, and, apart from Confessions (1930), a moving account of his illness, his career was virtually over.