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The French Symbolist Movement

The French movement known as “Symbolism” developed around a group of poets from the late 19th century, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarmé. Contrary to their predecessors, these poets rejected the aesthetics of naturalism and realism. Instead of trying to represent reality in a direct way, the Symbolists wanted to illuminate profounder truths by way of the imagination. Through dreams, visions, and other modes of associative image-making, these poets sought, in Rimbaud’s words, to effect the “systematic derangement of the senses.” As Jean Moréas explained in his “Symbolist Manifesto,” first published in 1886, such a derangement of the senses paradoxically helps reveal the deeper meanings that lie behind the surface of things. In Symbolist literature, “representations of nature, human activities, and everyday phenomena” are in fact “veiled reflections of the senses pointing to archetypal meanings through their esoteric connections.” Eliot was an avid student of the French Symbolists, and The Waste Land bears the marks of his study. Through the “systematic derangement” of images, perceptions, and associations, Eliot produced a poem that reflects the intellectual and spiritual destabilization of his contemporary moment.

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