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77 ARTHUR SYMONS: AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WRITINGS ABOUT HIM By Carol Simpson Stern (Roosevelt University) The following bibliography contains all critical studies and the most important reviews about Arthur Symons and his writings which I have been able to locate, except those references which make too slight mention of him or his works to be worthy of inclusion. In the latter category are a broad range of books on Symbolism, the Nineties, or Symons' acquaintances, all of which rehearse quite generally and sketchily the now familiar points of greatest significance in Symons' career. These references, casual and including no information that is not available elsewhere in a better source, are omitted. On the question of reviews, whether they should be included or left out, I was governed by a simple principle. If the review is either by an important writer, such as Pater, Yeats, Beerbohm, or Le Gallienne, or of the kind that elicited a flurry of critical response, then it is included; if it fell into neither category, then it is not. My only defense of this principle lies in a recognition of both Symons* publishing practices and the enormity of the task of tracking down all reviews. Given his annoying habit in his later years of reassembling under one cover, often quite arbitrarily, essays printed some ten to twenty years earlier and producing books of such uneven quality as Notes on Joseph Conrad (I925), From Toulouse Lautrec to Rodin (1930TT and A Study of Walter Pater (1932), it seemed unprofitable to include reviews of these books which were both inevitably out-dated when they appeared and unworthy of Symons who, if in better health and less straitened circumstances, would, in all probability, not have published them. Finally, I have omitted a half-dozen references that have stubbornly resisted my efforts to fully describe them. These I hope to include in an up-dating of the bibliography. The bibliography traces the critical reception of Symons' writings from I889 to I973 and attempts to provide the scholar and literary historian with a record of both Symons' literary career and the shifting responses of the critics to it. Briefly, it can be divided into four convenient periods. The first, I889I905 , charts Symons' gradual rise to fame with the year I899 witnessing the publication of his most important book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature. The second, 1908-1950» sees a protracted decline in his popularity, beginning with his madness, and a growing insistence on viewing him as a representative decadent of the Nineties. The third, 1953-1970, inaugurates a revival of interest in him and his works in which his literary relationships to Joyce, Yeats, Eliot and Pound, and, in a lesser way, to Beardsley, Havelock Ellis and George Moore become increasingly important. This period undertakes a reassessment of his literary achievements. Finally, 1970 to the present seems to be witnessing a tapering off of the critical response to 78 Symons' writings. In June of 1973» Julian Symons' piece on him in the London Times seems dé .ja vu as it attempts again to reacquaint the public with an interesting figure of only ephemeral importance. Between 1889 and 1899» Symons' writings were either celebrated enthusiastically as the products of an exquisite, avante-garde sensibility, or they were damned with equal fervor for the very same characteristics that had excited support. The extremes of support and disapproval during this period can be readily glimpsed in two reviews of Symons' London Nights. Yeats' "That Subtle Shade," London Bookman (1895), praises the sincerity of the poet who writes under the impulse of "exquisite memory"; "Pah," Pall Mall Gazette (I885), condemns him as a "very dirty-minded man." A decade or so later (1905)» when Symons wrote on all the arts and when his poetry had broadened to include Nature as well as Patchouli, the critical response continued to be divided. Max Beerbohm (I903, 1904), James Huneker, and Desmond MacCarthy (I907) all praised the refinements of Symons' Impressionistic criticism, while Richard Le Gallienne (I9IO), and Paul Elmer More (1905), deplored the lack of what is best described as an Arnoldesque moral temperament in his critical writings and branded him a creature of the "tainted" breed...

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