French Symbolism is perhaps the most influential poetic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving its mark not just on all subsequent poetry and poetic thought (as well as prose, literary criticism and, importantly, theatre and dramatic practice) in French-speaking countries, but on European literature and on the literatures of South and North America. Symbolist ideas and influences can be found in poets as diverse as Yeats, Rilke, D'Annunzio, Ungaretti, and Akhmatova, in the Hungarian Endre Ady, the Romanian Ion Barbu, not to mention in British and American ‘modernism’, and especially in the work of Pound, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. Its importance is difficult to overstate, and though it is often explained in terms of a few ‘buzzwords’ such as ‘suggestion’, ‘musicality’, ‘free verse’ (though it was also a formalist movement), its poetry and critical principles are more complicated, more various and less coherent than is often allowed. It was commonplace, even among Symbolist poets themselves, to claim that there were as many Symbolisms as there were Symbolists, and the critic looking for a stable literary doctrine, or even a set of agreed principles, would be disappointed. In terms of the poetry the movement produced, this is undoubtedly a good thing: the Symbolists emitted plenty of literary formulae, but few ever wrote according to them.

The poets we usually associate with the school are Mallarmé, often seen as its leader, and Verlaine (a sort of louche absentee father who, when interviewed, always claimed not to know what ‘Symbolisme’ meant).