Symbolism is a late-19th-century literary movement that used suggestive imagery and music-like language to evoke emotions beyond direct statement.
The Symbolist movement began in France in the 1880s with poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, who reacted against the documentary ambitions of naturalism. Where naturalists wanted clarity, the Symbolists wanted suggestion; where realists described, Symbolists evoked. Their poems trafficked in dream, synaesthesia, and mood, and they treated language as a kind of music whose meaning lay in resonance rather than reference. Mallarmé argued that to name an object was to destroy three-quarters of the poem. The movement reshaped poetry across Europe — W.B. Yeats in Ireland, Rainer Maria Rilke in Austria, Aleksandr Blok in Russia all owe it directly — and fed straight into modernism. Its premise, that the deepest truths arrive sideways, remains poetry's working assumption today.