Re-crediting Arthur Symons, Decadent-Modernist Literary Ghost

The essay aims at a re-evaluation of Arthur Symons, a major figure not simply in the English, but also in the European passage from fin-de-siècle literature and culture to Modernism. Far from being “one of the ghosts of literary history” – as argued in a famous early-1980s assessment by Eric Warner and Graham Hough – Symons had a crucial impact on Modernist poetics which goes much further than his usual association with W. B. Yeats or James Joyce. In this essay, Symons is reconsidered as a mediator between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, a fundamental catalyst in making the transition between the last expressions of Aestheticism and proto-Modernism nearly seamless. The essay traces lines of continuities, rather than discontinuities, between the two epistemes through the art of Symons and proposes a corrective to the traditional narratives of the histories of Aestheticism and Modernism. It also uncovers some usually neglected connections between Symons and the literature of the early twentieth century.