MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature...

MIT International Journal of English Language & Literature, Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2015, pp. 1–10 1ISSN 2347-9779 © MIT Publications

The Evolution of Symbolism from Yeats to Stevens

Dr. Daniel AlbrightProfessor of Literature

Harvard University

Baudelaire wanted to find the essences hidden in the fleeting junk of city life, and the school of poetry that seeks immaterial essences, the phlogiston inside common things, is called Symbolism. Value: seek meaning only in the occult essences hidden in external objects–namely symbols. Baudelaire was one of the founders of this school, for his sonnet “Correspondences” (1857) stated its means and hinted at its goals:

Nature is a temple where living columnsReverberate at times with confusing words;There man walks across the symbol-woodsAnd symbols with knowing glances look at him.

As long-drawn far-off echoes themselves confoundIn a profound and tenebrous unity,Vast as night and vast as clarity,Perfumes, color, sounds, they all respond.

There are perfumes fresh as children’s flesh,Sweet as the sounds of oboes, green as prairies,—And others, corrupted, rich, triumphant, flush,

Diffusing through space in an infinite series,Like amber and musk, benjamin and incense,Chanting the rapture of spirit and sense. (translated from http://fleursdumal.org/poem/103)

A Symbolist artist is a detective hunting for treasure, living treasure; it is no accident that Baudelaire was much inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the detective story. The Symbolist finds most of existence to be a desert, blank and boring; but somewhere there lurks meaning, if the artist can respond fully enough to nature’s subliminal urgencies. Baudelaire hoped to find at the edges of nature certain faint sensations provoca-tive of beautiful feelings; hovering at the verge of things is the sensational Eden of which the poet dreams, achieved by means of eerie combinations of sense-data.


Realism tends to celebrate the world as it is. Symbolism, on the other hand, concerns itself with the transcendental, the ideal; it dismissed the physical world as meaningless, except for a few precious occluded objects–symbols–phosphorescent with certain abstract potencies of meaning. As Jean Moréas wrote in the Symbolist manifesto (1886):

The enemy of “instruction, declamation, false sensibility, objective description,” symbolic poetry seeks: to clothe the Idea in a sensible form which would not be a goal in itself, but which, while always serving to express the Idea, would remain subordinate to it. The Idea, in turn, must not let itself be seen deprived of the sumptuous robes of external analogy; for the essential character of symbolic art consists of never going so far as to conceive the Idea in itself. So, in this art, pictures from nature and human actions andall concrete phenomena are never allowed to be manifest in themselves: they are in the artwork assensible appearances destined to represent their esoteric affinities with primordial Ideas. . . .

Sometimes mythical phantasms, from antique Demogorgon to Belial, from the Cabeiri to the Necromancers, appear luxuriouslyattired on Caliban’s rock or in Titania’s forest, to the mixolydian modes of barbitons and octachords. (translated from https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1886_moreas.html)

Symbolism treated, not exact appearances, the heft of physical objects, but the far reaches of imagination.

How can art skim above the physical world, enter the azure realm of the ideal? One method is by naming obvious unrealities, such as unicorns; ordinary language is poorly equipped to describe the delicate delirium that Symbolist writers wish to present. Wilde’s praise of lying in “The Decay of Lying” is precisely validated by this philosophy of art. A more arcane method is the language of synesthesia (that is, the crossing-over from one sense to another): in Baudelaire’s sonnet, perfumes are like oboes or the feel of a child’s flesh. Synesthesia is a technique for reconstruing commonplace nature into something fresh, for indicating intuitions of some indwelling transsensuous beauty, a beauty which (since it is beyond the usual range of our sensory apparatus) expresses itself through an unusual, “wrong” sense-organ.

The writer who did most to bring the French Symbolists—Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others—to the English-speaking world was Arthur Symons, in a book called The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). Symons dedicated his book to W.B. Yeats, whom he considered the great Symbolist poet in the English language.

Yeats regarded symbols as the basic vocabulary of poetry. Yeats was the son of a painter influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, a sociable, highly intelligent, but not too successful man; his son William Butler seemed in his youth dreamy and unfocused, such a poor student that he couldn’t think of attending Trinity College, the Protestant university in Ireland–he attended art school instead. He soon lost all interest in painting, but in beginning a career was in the odd position of having a fairly good education in art history while having only a spotty and scattered knowledge of everything else. He had an acute mind and a retentive memory, and was to learn a good deal about philosophy, comparative religion, and occultism; but from youth on he conceived that the basic elements of poetry were imagistic, indeed pictographic–when Yeats speaks of symbols he means visual designs, and in his poetry you can often watch him arraying little pictures into larger schemes of meaning. Sometimes it’s as if Yeats wrote poems by arranging a tableau of fortune-telling cards, such as the Tarot pack.

Yeats, under the influence of his studies with Madame Blavatsky and other spiritualists and Rosicrucians, came to understand the business of the poet in a somewhat odd way. He considered that the human race had a single huge imagination, with he called the anima mundi, which was a treasure-house of all possible symbols; every poet was granted access to certain parts of the anima mundi, from which he or she gathered a


private stock of symbols. Each poet claimed a different set: Shelley, Yeats explains, controlled such symbols as cave, tower, and star; Yeats himself was dealt a different hand, including tower, but not star; in addition to tower, Yeats controlled tree, hawk, well, moon, sun (by his own count, as he says in W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901-37, ed. Ursula Bridge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 38), and perhaps I might add a few more to the list, such as sword, dome, dancing woman, and most of all rose.

In his essay “The Autumn of the Body” (1898), Yeats rejected the world of mainstream Victorian poetry, on the grounds that Tennyson and Browning tried to incorporate into poetry too much of the external world–politics, science, and so forth; Yeats by contrast was drawn to the Frenchified idea of poésie pure, a rarefied, immaterial sort of sensation-cultivating:

Man has wooed and won the world, and has fallen weary . . . with a weariness that will not end until the last autumn, when the stars shall be blown away like withered leaves. He grew weary when he said, “These things that I touch and see and hear are alone real,” for he saw them without illusion at last, and found them but air and dust and moisture. . . . The arts are, I believe, about to take upon their shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of priests, and to lead us back upon our journey by filling our thoughts with the essences of things, and not with things. (Essays and Introductions (New York: Collier Books, 1961), pp. 190, 192-3)

Every symbol is the limit-point of an essentializing process: a symbol is the residue of meaning that exists when all superfluous aspects of a thing are stripped away. Liberated from space and time and all other human constructs, a symbol truly exists only in the anima mundi, though you may find symbolic value embodied in actual physical objects, if those objects are significant enough to you. It’s important here to distinguish a symbol from a sign: a sign has meaning only through an act of arbitrary labeling–we all agree that a green traffic signal means go, not because there’s anything about green that naturally excites forward motion, but because a convention has been established. A symbol, though, has its value transcendentally guaranteed: if lilies, honey, gold, seem fringed with some aura of meaning, it’s not our doing–the human race as a whole is responsible, or God. In fact it’s not easy to be a symbolist and an atheist at the same time; symbolism works most easily if you believe in a supernatural evaluator.

Symbolism always tends to be opposed to realistic representation. A simple example can be found in the third volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), by the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Contemplating the Byzantine mosaic of olive trees in St. Mark’s, Venice, Ruskin asks himself, how can an artist render an olive tree in such a way that it won’t be mistaken for some other tree?

Let it be granted that an idea of an olive-tree is indeed to be given us … Now the main characteristics of an olive-tree are these. It has sharp and slender leaves of a greyish green, nearly grey on the under surface … Its fruit, when ripe, is black and lustrous, but of course so small, that, unless in great quantity, it is not conspicuous upon the tree. Its trunk and branches are peculiarly fantastic in their twisting … and the trunk is often hollow, and even rent into many divisions like separate stems, but the extremities are exquisitely graceful … the notable and characteristic effect of the tree in the distance is of a rounded and soft mass or ball of downy foliage.

Supposing a modern artist to address himself to the rendering of this tree with his best skill: he will probably draw accurately the twisting of the branches, but yet this will hardly distinguish the tree from an oak … The fruit, and the peculiar grace of the leaves at the extremities … will all be too minute to be rendered … the main points of the olive-tree will all at last remain untold.


Now observe, the old Byzantine mosaicist begins his work at an enormous disadvantage. It is to be some one hundred and fifty feet above the eye, in a dark cupola; executed not with free touches of the pencil, but with square pieces of glass … were he to draw the leaves of their natural size, they would be so small that their forms would be invisible … So he arranges them in small clusters … elongated so as to give the idea of leafage upon a spray … (John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, vol. III (Boston: Dana Estes, n.d.), pp. 176-78)

In conjunction with this description, Ruskin prints his own drawing of the mosaic olive tree, with huge fruit and leaves, very little trunk or branches. The mosaic is not a representation of an olive-tree, but of olive-treeness, in which those salient points that separate an olive-tree from every other type of tree find visual expression. To put it another way, the artist has presented the platonic form of the olive-tree, a schema of its ultimate growth-pattern, not a picture of an individual specimen.

It is the liberation from accident, quirk, particularity, that distinguishes a symbol from a normal object. In an early essay, “Symbolism in Painting” (1898), Yeats suggests that anything can be made symbolic simply by decontextualizing it, making it spaceless and timeless:

if you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their effects . . . it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect (Essays and Introductions, pp. 148-49)

Symbols, then, interrupt the causal chain, frustrate the world, and populate a private domain of hyperentities.

The master symbol of Yeats’s early poetry is the Rose. The Rose varies between two poles: the historical and particular, as when it refers to the love of Yeats’s life, the beautiful revolutionary Maud Gonne, or when it refers to Ireland itself; and a state so ample and inclusive that it is almost a symbol of Symbolism itself–an allegation of the oneness of all beautiful objects, a hypothetical apex where all upward-striving things converge. On one hand, the Rose is intimate with the immediate textures of our lives, and on the other hand it’s fully transcendent. But what’s strange about Yeats’s poetic practice is his suspiciousness of the Rose.

Often the contemplation of the Rose leads the poet to an exhilarating but dangerous state of overwhelm: the Rose seems to lead him to the brink of apocalypse, when the stars shall “be blown about the sky, / Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die” (“The Secret Rose,”W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright(London: Everyman, 1994), p. 87). Many of the poems that Yeats wrote near the end of the nineteenth century seem ready to terminate in the abyss: “The Valley of the Black Pig,” for example, concerns the end of the world: the poem was a result of Yeats’s researches into Irish folklore: a poor Irish woman told him of “the battle of the Black Pig, which seemed to her a battle between Ireland and England, but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral Darkness again” (Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 111). Yeats sometimes thought of his poetry as a device to hasten the world’s end, by realizing uncontrollable spiritual forces on earth.

But–do we, does Yeats, really want the world to end? In one of his most famous poems, “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time”–that is, “To the Rose of Eternity crucified on the cross of Time.” Yeats prays ardently for the Rose to descend to him, to inspire him; but in the middle of the poem he stops beckoning the Rose and stars thrusting her away:

Come near, come near, come near–Ah, leave me stillA little space for the rose-breath to fill!


Lest I no more hear common things that crave;The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,The field-mouse running by me in the grass,And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;But seek alone to hear the strange things saidBy God to the bright hearts of those long dead,And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know. (W. B. Yeats, The Poems, ed Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1994), pp. 52-53)

Come near–but don’t come too near. Most of the cherishable minute particulars of life seem to vanish if our eyes are blind to everything except Eternal Beauty; and the poet himself may start to speak an unintelligible language under her influence, just as, at Pentecost, the Holy Ghost inspired a sort of hypersignificant babbling. In his middle age Yeats once said, “I have no speech but symbol,/The pagan speech I made/Amid the dreams of youth” (“Her Courage,” The Poems, p. 209); but a speech that’s all symbol may turn out to be no language at all. Perhaps poetry needs a certain degree of prose mixed in, a few stray worms and field-mice, to keep it from becoming précieux and bizarre.

In Yeats’s early work, he depended on symbols with a predetermined, transcendental meaning, such as the Rose; but his later symbols, such as the tower, are not so much donors of meaning as receivers of it. Here is the opening of his poem “Blood and the Moon” (1928):

Blessed be this place,More blessed still this tower;A bloody, arrogant powerRose out of the raceUttering, mastering it,Rose like these walls from these Storm-beaten cottages–In mockery I have setA powerful emblem up,And sing it rhyme upon rhymeIn mockery of a timeHalf dead at the top. (The Poems, p. 287)

The poem illustrates the process by which ordinary, opaque objects become luminous, permeable, significant. The poet claims the authority to create a symbol where (perhaps) none existed before; this is an important stage in the opening-out of the symbol into a more amiable, user-friendly entity. When we cast our gaze not at European poetry but American poetry we see a still further broadening of the concept of the symbol—not every European poet has a restrictive definition of the symbol, and not every American poet has a broad definition of the symbol, but this will serve as a rule of thumb. But before I discuss a specimen American symbolist, Wallace Stevens, I want to talk a little about Aestheticism.


The Symbolists of the nineteenth century were often members of the Aesthetic movement. Both Symbol-ism and Aestheticism generate many of their excitements from relinquishing and renouncing, from a cultivated unnaturalness. Aestheticism—the doctrine of art-for-art’s-sake, or maybe more exactly, of everything-for-art’s sake—never produced an official manifesto, but the Conclusion (1868) to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance and Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” (1891) come pretty close to constituting such a thing. Here is Pater:

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. (Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 190)

Among the main points of Oscar Wilde’s essay are these:

1. Nature is shapeless, foul, boring, full of insects and uncooked birds. A sensible person stays indoors as much as possible.

2. Man in his natural state is also shapeless, foul, boring:

It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. (Complete Works, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1973), p. 975).

This explains why Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest can say, “it is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out” (Complete Works, p. 356): people are differentiated only by artificial inflections of the surface; on the deepest levels we are all the same, dully, monotonously the same.

3. Human life is most satisfactory when most artificial. Insofar as we can make ourselves into a work of art, we succeed in enriching our lives. There are many avenues open to the person who wants to manufacture himself as an artifice: one can dress as a dandy (as Baudelaire recommended before Wilde); one can cultivate an elaborate system of etiquette, thereby reducing social life to ritual or game; one can surround oneself with exquisite sensory stimuli, such as incense, beautiful paintings, and chamber music. But the most significant way of artificializing one’s identity is the histrionic method: that is, the conscious assumption of a theatrical role. It is of no consequence which role one chooses, but one must choose; the person who does not liberate himself by means of role-playing must instead be confined to his or her blank stupid natural self.


4. The priority of Art over Nature is absolute. Nature struggles in its clumsy way to conform to the models of beauty that Art has provided for it:

Cyril. Nature follows the landscape painter, then, and takes her effects from him?Vivian. Certainly. Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? . . . [Fogs] did not exist till Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. (Complete Works, p. 986)

In the same way, Art has dominion over human life: we are formless lumps of flesh until Art provides us with form. The histrionic method is one example of this; but Wilde was eager to make still more extravagant claims about the priority of Art over human nature. Why are we born with our particular facial features and body shape? The usual answer today would be that these are determined by a recombination of our parents’ genes. But Wilde offered a different answer: fetal development is determined by the works of art at which the mother stares:

The Greeks . . . set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. (Complete Works, pp. 982-83)

Wilde’s vision of the world is almost wholly denatured: Nature exists only as a principle of inertia, a sluggishness impeding Art from realizing its strict delicate adorabilities. The century between Wordsworth and Wilde show a perfect reversal in attitudes toward nature.

1. An important corollary to this loss of Nature is a loss of Truth.

If there is no substrate to experience, there is nothing against which we can compare a proposition to discover whether it is true or false; a proposition cannot be judged according to its congruence to external reality if there isn’t any external reality. This is why Wilde dotes on paradox: a proposition and its contrary are equally valid. This is why Wilde deplores the Decay of Lying: truths are no better than fictions—indeed truths are worse than fictions, because truths are more boring.

But in some ways the later Aestheticism of the twentieth century gives a more complete and compelling presentation of the role of art and artistic sensation in human life. The American poet Wallace Stevens will provide a good example.

Wallace Stevens spent much of his energy trying to elucidate the relationship between the human mind and external nature. In his poem “The Comedian as the Letter C” (1922), the protagonist Crispin experiments with two formulae for this relationship. The first, from poem’s opening section, called The World without Imagination, is this: Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates Of snails, musician of pears, principium

And lex. (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 27)This is the non-aesthetic way of understanding the world: one one side there is the masterful human subject; on the other side is mindless nature, over which mankind has dominion, naming, taxonomizing, making sense of it. But later on, in the section called The Idea of a Colony, the poet undoes this dualistic scheme:


Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence. That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. (Collected Poems, pp. 36-37)As the mind lets go off its authority, its zeal to master, we achieve a sort of interpenetration between ourselves and the physical world: as William Blake said long before, we become what we behold. We think with the world instead of thinking at the world. The imagination is the faculty that allows this melding with creation. Stevens uses metaphors of colonization, but it would be just as correct to say that the soil colonizes us as vice versa.

The evil, as Stevens sees it, arises from the attempt to separate ourselves from the external universe, to carve out a closed, hermetically sealed domain of mental and artistic (false-artistic) operation. He figures this evil in many ways:

The greatest poverty is not to liveIn a physical world, to feel that one’s desireIs too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observeThe green corn gleaming and experienceThe minor of what we feel. (“Esthétique du Mal” (1944), Collected Poems, p. 325)

Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.This arrival in the wild country of the soul,

All approaches gone, being completely there,

Where the wild poem is a substituteFor the woman one loves or ought to love,One wild rhapsody a fake for another.

You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight

Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra

Hums and you say “The world in a verse,


A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,Women invisible in music and motion and color,”After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala. (“Arrival at the Waldorf” (1940), Collected Poems, pp. 240-41)

Stevens deplores the art that muffles, the art that becomes a screen from or surrogate for actual experience. Bad art (which in “Arrival at the Waldorf” seems to be something like Glenn Miller as heard while drinking your third martini) provides an Ersatz universe, spectral and specular. Good art provides an immediate apprehension of the realness of reality.

Stevens considered that the Christian religion, with its cellophane fantasies of an afterlife where the harps always play in the key of C, was an especially unattractive form of bad art. In “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (1922), Stevens first announces that “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame,” and then contrasts the Christian woman’s ascetic conscience-ridden heaven with his own dreams of saints turned plump and bawdy—instead of bloodless Protestant hymns a sort of interstellar jazz:

Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.This will make widows wince. But fictive thingsWink as they will. Wink most when widows wince. (Collected Poems, p. 59)

And in “Sunday Morning” (1915) Stevens applauds a woman’s decision to delight in coffee and oranges and a cockatoo instead of going to church—for the atheist / hedonist, Stevens announces, “The sky will be much friendlier then . . . Not this dividing and indifferent blue” (Collected Poems, p. 68). The secular imagination, not the Christian imagination, provides true connection to the cosmos.

In some of Stevens’ most successful poems, he contemplates a particular artwork that behaves as a kind of secular version of the Holy Ghost, arresting us, enforcing a sudden crystallizing of undistinguished space into human order. This artwork—Stevens’ version of the symbol—might be a song or a painting or just about anything. In “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934), the woman singing by the ocean’s edge assimilates into her song the whole sea: she parses out the inhuman into the humanly comprehensible, makes acute and demarcated what was previously blunt and dark, unmeaning. In “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919), the artwork is less magical, but still full of amazing power:

I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air.


It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. (“Anecdote of the Jar” (1919), Collected Poems, p. 76)

The homely verse (mostly tetrameter, with clompingly graceless iambs), the matter-of-fact syntax and diction, the incompetent rhymes, the hillbilly setting, all contribute to a sense that there is nothing special about this jar: it isn’t a Chinese vase, it’s just an ordinary jug you might store beans or moonshine in. But even in its plainness it is a human artifact, and like any artifact it asserts human presence and acts as an orientation point: it unsavages nature by providing a reference frame, a coordinate geometry. In Stevens’ brand of symbolism, the symbol isn’t some extraordinary and difficult-to-find object that casts the prosaic universe into shadow, reveals its worthlessness; instead the symbol is the talisman that imparts human meaning to the whole world in which human beings move. It turns the planet earth into our home.

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