O symbolism was a literary trend that was born in France, with the aesthetic theories of Charles Baudelaire, and flourished mainly in the poetry, in different parts of the western world, at the end of the 19th century. It is the last move before the emergence of modernism in the literature, so it is also considered pre-modern.
As the name points out, Symbolist poetry proposed a rescue ofsymbols, that is, of a language that understood a universality. Here, the poet is a decipherer of the symbols that make up the nature around him. Against the material superficiality of the body, the objectivity of the realism and the animal descriptions of the naturalism, the symbolism wants dive intospirit, which is related to something greater, to a collective universal instance, to a transcendence.
know more: Literary language: what's the difference?
Historical context
Symbolist literature was a reaction to scientific and positivists from the last quarter of the 19th century. Europe was experiencing the boiling of
Second Industrial Revolution, which he carried with him, in addition to the financial capitalism, the ideologies of empiricism and determinism. It is a technical-analytical conception of the world, in which reality is only apprehended by the quantification and analysis of data, in favor of the development of the technique.There was a prevailing optimism in the advancement of the industry, expressed in the idea of progress. Symbolists, however, see the emergence of metropolises, accompanied by misery, industrial dirt and the exploitation of the labor force, a decadencedesperate, a morbidity that is not at all progressive.
Therefore, they direct their lyric not for objective descriptions, but for an attempt to conciliationbetween matter and spirit, an attempt to rescue a deteriorated humanity. For this stance, they were also called “decadentists” and “damned”.
Symbolists questioned rationalist and mechanical conclusions in vogue at the time, as they gave no space to the subject's existence, serving only as fuel for the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie. They sought something beyond materialism and beyond empiricism: a sense of universality, which would be recovered through poetic language. They sought, in contrast to numerical and technological impersonality, transcendental values — the Good, the True, the Beautiful.
Read too: Romanticism: aesthetic movement based on bourgeois values
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Characteristics of Symbolism
- Use of breaks, ellipsis, blank spaces and syntactic breaks to represent metaphysical silence;
- Synesthesia: construction of verses that describe sounds, aromas and colors, because the five senses they are instruments for capturing the surrounding symbols;
- Themes focused on human interiority, on the ecstasy of the spirit;
- Ethereal vocabulary and references to the Nothing and the Absolute;
- Common presence of antitheses and oppositions, thanks to attempts to incarnate what is divine and spiritualize what is earthly: the poem is the form of conciliation between the material and spiritual planes;
- Understanding of poetry as a vision of existence;
- Presence of religiosity, not only Christian but also Eastern, composing the Symbolist quest for transcendence;
- Twilight descriptions, simultaneous presence of light and shadow;
- Gloomy, dismal, decadent images;
- Loosening of metric rigor Parnassian, making room for irregular metering and free verses;
- Poem musical concept.
The poem “Correspondences”, by Charles Baudelaire, has in its very title the central idea of symbolism: Symbolist language intends to establish a correspondence between the material plane and the transcendental plane, between the divine and the profane.
Correspondence
Nature is a living temple in which the pillars
They often allow unusual plots to filter out;
The man crosses it in the middle of a grove of secrets
That there stalk you with their familiar eyes.
Like long echoes that fade in the distance
In a dizzying and dismal unity,
As vast as night and as light,
Sounds, colors and perfumes harmonize.
There are fresh aromas like infant meat,
Sweet like the oboe, green like the meadow,
And others, already dissolute, rich and triumphant,
With the fluidity of what never ends,
Like musk, incense and resins from the Orient,
May glory exalt the senses and the mind.
(Charles Baudelaire, the evil flowers, 1857, trans. Ivan Junqueira)
THE evocation of spirituality it is already present in the first verse, in which Nature, initiated in a capital letter, as an entity, is characterized as a living temple, that is, there is a hidden spiritual life behind the material existence of the stuff. Man crosses this temple alive in the midst of a grove of symbols. And these symbols look at men with familiarity — for those are usually conventional, that is, they exist because of their collective sense.
the poet speaks in echoes, sounds, Colors and Perfumes: is the presence of the capture kinesthetic of symbols. Poetic language is the decipherer, the one that establishes a bridge, a correspondence between the material world and the spirit world. The reference to musk, incense and resins from the Orient also recaptures this kinesthetic sensibility, as well as it refers to a spiritual universe, which makes use of this aromatic practice as contact with the transcendental.
It is possible to verify the typical symbolist characteristics also in Cruz e Sousa, the main Brazilian exponent of the movement:
immortal attitude
Open your eyes to Life and be mute!
Oh! just believe indefinitely
To be enlightened all
Of an immortal and transcendent light.
To believe is to feel, as a secret shield,
The smiling, lucid, seer soul...
And abandon the dirty horned god,
The unrepentant Flesh satyr.
Abandon the faint roars,
The infinite moan of moans
What goes in the mud wallowing meat.
look up, raise your arms
To the eternal Silence of Spaces
and in Silence, silence looking...
(Cross and Sousa, latest sonnets, 1905)
The poem begins with a suggestion to the sense of vision: opening the eyes to Life (also the use of capital letters as a symbolic evocation of the word), everything lights up, everything tends totranscendence. The second stanza equates faith with sensitivity, and despises the material, carnal aspect of existence, preferring the exaltation of the spirit — the laughing soul abandons “the dirty horned god”, “the satyr of the Flesh”.
In the third stanza, Cruz e Sousa goes on to describe auditory sensory emanations - roars and moans of the mortal existence is opposed to the "eternal Silence of Spaces" that appears in the last stanza, following the cadence of antitheses and paradoxes symbolist.
Symbolism in Europe
It was in France in the last half of the 19th century that symbolism emerged, characterized as a school of “poets cursed" and "decadent", bohemians, Parisian night goers and often showing behavior scandalous.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
![Portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire, an important Symbolist poet.[1]](/f/6f092627372d71c2352c23229f599324.jpg)
Your publication titled the evil flowers, released in 1857, is considered forerunner of the Symbolist movement. His theory of correspondences conceives the visible world as a correspondence of an invisible and superior world, which must be reached by the poet through his work with language, and ended up inspiring or advocating French symbolism, which would emerge as a movement for some time later.
The ethereal description of the sunset in the poem “Harmonia da afternoon”, a proposal of a world that evaporates, full of sounds and aromas and the evocation of a Universe that conceives more than the mere objective presentation of the movement of the earth around the sun, it is an example of the influence that Baudelaire will exert on the literary current symbolist:
afternoon harmony
The time has come when, vibrating the virgin stem,
Each flower evaporates like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes pulse in the almost incorporeal air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
Each flower evaporates like a censer;
Shake violins like fibers that afflict themselves;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
Heaven is sad and beautiful like a great oratory.
Shake violins like fibers that afflict themselves,
Tender souls who hate the vast and inglorious nothingness!
Heaven is sad and beautiful like a great oratory;
The sun drowns in waves that stain it with blood.
Tender souls who hate the vast and inglorious Nothingness
They pick up from the past the illusions that fake it!
The sun is now drowning in waves that stain it with blood...
Your memory shines on me like a monstrance!
(Charles Baudelaire, the evil flowers, 1857, trans. Ivan Junqueira)
Baudelaire also wrote essays in which he used the word modernity to describe the changes brought about by the impact of industry development in a rapidly changing Europe. He was one of the first authors to make this suggestion, drawing the attention of his contemporaries to an awareness of themselves as moderns.
It is considered a pioneer of what was later understood as modernism, for its tendency to despise what had been conceived as classical culture, clothing that no longer served its present, ephemeral time of large-scale production and urbanization.
Main works by Baudelaire: the evil flowers (1857)—poetry; Aesthetic Curiosities (1869) — prose; short poems in prose (1869).
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898))
Author known for his hermeticism: the complexity of the world that was built permeates the construction of his verses, guided by the theme of impossibility and by a search perpetual of perfection of form, in constant anguish that leads him to propose games of poetic composition, whose genius was recognized belatedly.
He was a great influencer of literary vanguards and is among the forerunners of concrete poetry, mainly for the long poem “A game of dice”, written in free verses and in revolutionary typography for the time.
“Summer sadness”, in turn, is one of several examples of texts by the author related to the Symbolist tradition:
Summertime Sadness
The sun, on the sand, warms, O sleeping brave,
The gold of your eat in a languorous bath,
Burning your incense in your fierce face,
And mix a loving filter to your tears.
From this white glow to stillness
It makes you say, doleful, oh discreet caresses,
‘The two of us will never be a cold mummy
Under the ancient desert and standing palm trees!’
But your hair, warm river, begs
To fearlessly drown our sad soul
And find that Nothing that in your being does not thrive.
I'll taste the bistre your eyelashes cry
To see if he donates to the one you hurt
The insensitivity of blue and stone.
(Stéphane Mallarmé, 1864, trans. Augusto de Campos)
In the example, typically Symbolist elements stand out: the kinesthetic descriptions the heat of the sun in analogy to incense; the presence of the mummy's morbidity in contrast to the vital, solar vision; the component of sadness, a sign of the mismatch with the contemporary world; the theme of Nothing, the aspiration of absolute emptiness; and the work with the symbolic evoked by the terms “blue” and “stone” as conveyors of insensitivity.
Main works by Mallarmé: Poetry (1887); and ramblings (1897) — essays in prose.
Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)
Great Brazilian influencer Alphonsus de Guimaraens, Verlaine is known for his autumnal tones and his constant attempt to reconcile reprehensible behavior. (the author even shot his own lover, the famous Rimbaud) and a mystical aspiration with an air of transcendental purity.
It is he, by the way, who proposes the term “damned poet”. Besides sonnets, also composed in prose and in free verses.Although the poet never understood himself as linked to any current, his work has clear shades of the Symbolist school:
autumn song
these laments
of the slow guitars
of autumn
fill my soul
of a calm wave
Of sleep.
And sobbing,
pale when
sounds the time,
I remember all
the crazy days
From the past.
And I go for nothing
In the bad air that flies.
What does it matter?
I go for life,
fallen leaf
And dead.
(Paul Verlaine, 1866, trans. Guilherme de Almeida)
Working with alliteration gives the poem a musicality that synesthetically evokes the very sound of the guitars he describes. The tone autumnal, the melancholy and pale response, the life compared to a fallen leaf that flies in the wind, resonate the Symbolist atmosphere.
Verlaine's main works: saturnine poems (1866); and the damn poets (1884).
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Icon of French poetry, Rimbaud was influenced by Verlaine and influenced him—the two met in the mid-1870s and became romantically involved, a relationship that scandalized the city at the time. The sensory character of Rimbaud's verses eternalized him canonically as one of the greatest poets of his time, although he only wrote until he was 20 years old.
eternity
It invades me again.
Who? — Eternity.
It's the sea that goes away
Like the sun that goes down.
sentinel soul,
teach me the game
the freezing night
And the day on fire.
Of human affairs,
Of the clapping and booing,
you're already disillusioned
And you spread out in the air.
Of none other,
Satin embers,
Duty vanishes
Without saying: anyway.
There is no hope there
And there is no future.
Science and patience,
Safe torture.
It invades me again.
Who? – Eternity.
It's the sea that goes away
With the sun that falls.
(Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Augusto de Campos)
THE musicality of the verses, working with the domain of the symbolic (night, fire, sea, sun) and the theme of mortal existence with transcendental dimension of Eternity and the soul are characteristics of the symbolism in this poem by Rimbaud.
Rimbaud's main works: Illuminations, 1872 (poetry); and a season in hell, 1873 (prose poems).
Symbolism in Brazil
The Brazilian symbolist movement broadly incorporated the compositional procedures of French symbolism. However, the bohemian night scenes and the epithet of damned are replaced by a literature of more religious and liturgical.
João da Cruz e Sousa (1863-1898)
Central figure of Brazilian Symbolism, Cruz e Sousa was born in Florianópolis. Son of freed slaves, but having participated in an elite formal education, his work reveals a irreconcilable scholarship with the racial situation of a Brazil that had just officially abolished the practice of slavery.
It is from the publication of Missals, book of lyrical prose, and Buckets, written in verse, both published in 1893, which shows the development of a symbolist aesthetic in Brazil. His work brings great novelty to the Brazilian literary procedure: alliterations, sound extensions, a break with the Parnassian rigor of meter, internal resonances, among others.
carnal and mystical
Through the thinnest regions of the mist
wander the Virgins and the rare Stars...
Like the light aroma of the corns
the entire horizon around perfumes.
In an evaporation of white foam
the clear perspectives are diluting...
With raw and radiant tiaras shines
the Stars go out one by one.
And then, in the darkness, in mystical numbness,
parades, with side-effects,
of the Virgins the sleepwalker procession...
O vague forms, nebulosities!
Essence of eternal virginities!
O intense chimeras of Desire...
(Cross and Sousa, Buckets, 1893)
“Carnal and mystical” is a suggestion of the very duality that the Symbolists intend to reconcile. The imprecision and the cloudiness brought by Cruz e Sousa — mist, dilution of perspectives, vague forms — are characteristic themes of symbolism, as well as synaesthesia, evoked in the "light aroma of the crops" that “the whole horizon around perfume”, as if the author constructed the poem based on sensibilities diverse. O capitalization to give absolute value to certain terms is also a recurring feature of the author.
Afonso Henriques da Costa Guimarães (1870-1921)
Better known as Alphonsus de Guimaraens, the author Latinized his name in 1894, a mystical intention that brought him closer to the Catholic hymns he liked so much. When he was just 17 years old, a cousin he loved and considered as a bride died. The episode left him obsessed with the death theme, which runs through his verses so much. there is a perennial disenchantment with the world which translates into morbid lamentation, and which coexists with a religious, liturgical theme.
In “Ismália”, perhaps his most famous poem, Alphonsus delineates the matter-spirit duality, making use of symbols such as the Moon, the sky, the sea, the dream, the angel, in a clear symbolist suggestion. Life and death, real and imaginary, light and dark: the verses are made of antagonisms, from the light and dark side of humanity, the carnal and the transcendent:
Ismalia
When Ismalia went crazy,
He stood in the tower dreaming...
saw a moon in the sky
He saw another moon at sea.
In the dream he got lost in,
He was all bathed in moonlight...
I wanted to go up to heaven
He wanted to go down to the sea...
And, in his madness,
In the tower he began to sing...
He was close to heaven,
It was far from the sea...
And like an angel hung
The wings to fly...
I wanted the moon in the sky,
I wanted the moon from the sea...
the wings that God gave you
They roared from pair to pair...
His soul rose to heaven,
His body went down to the sea...
(Alphonsus de Guimaraens)
Read more:Five poems by Alphonsus de Guimaraens
Augusto de Carvalho Rodrigues dos Anjos (1884-1914)
Difficult to fit into any literary movement, being outside and above it at the same time, Augusto dos Anjos Cruz e Sousa takes up the difficulty of adapting to everyday life and the structure of some verses. However, the novelty brought by the poet, understood by Otto Maria Carpeaux as the most original of all Brazilian poets, was a mixture of scientific terminology with a work permeated by deep sadness and bitterness.
disturbed by a huge metaphysical anguish, Augusto dos Anjos approaches the symbolists for the desire for unity, for overcoming all matter-spirit contrasts. He wrote a single book, entitled Me (1912), and died prematurely, at the age of 30, from tuberculosis.
Psychology of a loser
Me, son of carbon and ammonia,
Monster of darkness and brilliance,
I suffer, from the epigenesis of childhood,
The evil influence of the zodiac signs.
profoundly hypochondriac,
This environment disgusts me...
A yearning analogous to yearning rises to my mouth
That escapes from the mouth of a heartbeat.
Already the worm — this worker from the ruins —
May the rotten blood of carnage
It eats, and to life in general declares war,
Come peeking into my eyes to gnaw them,
And you'll just leave my hair,
In the inorganic coldness of the earth!
(August of the Angels)
O pathological vocabulary it mixes with mystical aspirations - chemical elements coexist with the signs of the zodiac. O constant and morbid malaise it translates into the only possible resolution: the end of the matter.
See too:Between the atom and the cosmos - five poems by Augusto dos Anjos
Summary
- It was a late nineteenth-century literary movement of French origin;
- He sought, through the word, the connection between the material and spiritual world;
- It had transcendent and metaphysical themes;
- Synesthesia, ethereal vocabulary, antitheses and paradoxes, use of pauses, alliterations and rhythmic musicality are characteristics of these compositions;
- Main European authors: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud;
- Main Brazilian authors: Cruz e Sousa, Alphonsus de Guimaraens, Augusto dos Anjos (the latter considered as “post-symbolist” or “pre-modern”).
Exercises
1) (And either)
prison of souls
“Ah! Every soul in a prison is imprisoned,
sobbing in the darkness between the bars
From the dungeon looking at immensity,
Seas, stars, afternoons, nature.
Everything wears an equal grandeur
When the soul in shackles the freedoms
Dreams and, dreaming, immortalities
It tears the Space of Purity into the ethereal.
O trapped, mute and closed souls
In colossal and abandoned prisons,
Of Pain in the dungeon, atrocious, funereal!
In these lonely, serious silences,
which keychain of heaven holds the keys
to open the doors of the Mystery for you?!”
(CRUZ E SOUSA, J. complete poetry. Florianópolis: Fundação Catarinense de Cultura / Fundação Banco do Brasil, 1993.)
The formal and thematic elements related to the cultural context of symbolism found in the poem “Cárcere das almas”, by Cruz e Sousa, are:
a) the option to approach, in simple and direct language, philosophical themes.
b) the prevalence of loving and intimate lyricism in relation to the nationalist theme.
c) the aesthetic refinement of poetic form and the metaphysical treatment of universal themes.
d) the evident concern of the lyrical self with social reality expressed in innovative poetic images.
e) the formal freedom of the poetic structure that dispenses with the traditional rhyme and meter in favor of everyday themes.
2) (PUC-Campinas)
"Oh! dormant, lukewarm guitars,
Sobbing in the moonlight, crying in the wind...
Sad profiles, the vaguest outlines,
Mouths muttering with regret.
...
Subtle palpitations in the moonlight.
I look forward to the most homesick moments,
When there they cry in the deserted street
The live strings of weeping guitars.
When the sounds of the guitars are sobbing,
When the sounds of guitars on the strings moan,
And they go on tearing and delighting,
Tearing the souls that tremble in the shadows.
...
Veiled voices, velvety voices,
Volupts of guitars, veiled voices,
wander in the old fast vortexes
From the winds, alive, vain, vulcanized."
The previous stanzas, clearly representative of _____, do not have _____.
Check the alternative that correctly completes THE TWO previous gaps.
a) Romanticism - synesthesia
b) Symbolism - alliteration and assonances
c) Romanticism - musicality
d) Parnassianism - metaphors and metonymies
e) Symbolism - white and free verses.
Commented resolution
- Alternative ç - Cruz e Sousa's poetry is based on a refined work with poetic language, which is notable for the use of decasyllables and the musicality of the aforementioned poem. There is a metaphysical treatment of universal themes, such as the mystery of existence.
- Alternative and - the poem is a clear representative of symbolism due to its kinesthetic tendency, and no presents free verses in its composition, with regular rhyme.
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
Ah! Every soul in a prison is imprisoned,
sobbing in the darkness between the bars
From the dungeon looking at immensity,
Seas, stars, afternoons, nature.
Everything wears an equal grandeur
When the soul in shackles the freedoms
Dreams and, dreaming, immortalities
It tears the Space of Purity into the ethereal.
O trapped, mute and closed souls
In colossal and abandoned prisons,
Of Pain in the dungeon, atrocious, funereal!
In these lonely, serious silences,
which keychain of heaven holds the keys
to open the doors of the Mystery for you?!
(CRUZ E SOUSA, J. Complete poetry. Florianópolis: Fundação Catarinense de Cultura / Fundação Banco do Brasil, 1993.)
The formal and thematic elements related to the cultural context of Symbolism found in the poem prison of souls, by Cruz e Sousa, are:
a) the option to approach, in simple and direct language, philosophical themes.
b) the prevalence of loving and intimate lyricism in relation to the nationalist theme.
c) the aesthetic refinement of poetic form and the metaphysical treatment of universal themes.
d) the evident concern of the lyrical self with social reality expressed in innovative poetic images.
e) the formal freedom of the poetic structure that dispenses with the traditional rhyme and meter in favor of everyday themes.
“Ah! dormant, lukewarm guitars,
Sobbing in the moonlight, crying in the wind...
Sad profiles, the vaguest outlines,
Mouths muttering with regret.
Subtle palpitations in the moonlight.
I look forward to the most homesick moments,
When there they cry in the deserted street
The live strings of weeping guitars.
When the sounds of the guitars are sobbing,
When the sounds of guitars on the strings moan,
And they go on tearing and delighting,
Tearing the souls that tremble in the shadows.
Veiled voices, velvety voices,
Volupts of guitars, veiled voices,
wander in the old fast vortexes
From the winds, alive, vain, vulcanized.”
The previous stanzas, clearly representative of _____, do not have _____ .
Check the alternative that correctly completes THE TWO previous gaps.