Syllabus of first course of fourth year poetry:
1- Symbolism / the symbolist movement
W.B. Yeats " Sailing to Byzantium''
'' The Second Coming''
2- The Imagist movement
T.S. Eliot '' The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock''
3- The Georgian School
Walter de la Mare '' The Listeners''
4- The Socialist School
W.H. Auden ''The Unknown Citizen''
Symbolism
Symbolism means demonstrating things by symbols. It declares an internal, psychological world having priority over the material and can be uttered through symbols or linguistic analogies. Because the psychological domain is difficult to enter into, symbolist artists visualize the inner visions or views. As one symbolist critic wrote in 1897: the world in which we live, which we affirm real, is purely a creation of our soul. The mind cannot go outside itself, and the things it believes to be outside it are only its thoughts.
symbolism as a literary movement has many important characteristics such as:
1-The symbolists criticized the expressive tendencies of the Realist theatre and naturalistic novels because they believed in the individuality and free will of human being.
2-The symbolists wished to release poetry from its expository functions (explanation and description) and eloquence in order to refer to the passing direct sensations of men's inner life and experience.
3-They tried to connect the unseen mystery of existence through a free and personal use of metaphors and images that, though lacking exact implication, would transfer the state of the poet's mind and hint at the dark and confused unity of an unexpressed reality.
4-Their goal was to create an art that would convey the poet's own inner dream. Poet like Baudelaire was a great symbolist. That is why, Verlaine and Rimbaud were seriously influenced by his poetic thoughts as in his own poems in his Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).
5-Baudelaire's concept of the correspondences can be adopted by Verlaine and Rimbaud that mixed between the senses (synesthesia) and the that is composed by Wagner to produce the musical qualities of poetry. Thus, the subject within a poem could be developed by the management of harmonies, tones and colours of carefully chosen words.
6-Their attempt to stress the necessary and distinctive qualities of poetry was based on their belief in the authority of art over other means of expression or knowledge. This was partly based on their idealistic supposition that under the materiality of the bodily world was another reality whose core could best be caught by the subjective passionate responses contributing to the work of art and generated by it as well.
7-In order to escape rigid material patterns and achieve freer poetic rhythms, many symbolist poets composed prose poems used free verse now becoming a chief form of contemporary poetry. Thus, when poetry was liberated from traditional metrical forms, it could develop thematic motifs freely.
8-The formal qualities and the suggestive power of language were stressed, images were presented in startling ways, and the device of synesthesia ( the suggestion of several sensations at one time) was employed to evoke the dark and confused unity (Baudelaire) of the unseen world. It was a difficult task because their medium and words were shared with all those who speak the language for ordinary purposes.
9-In order to achieve their aim, they tried to disinfect grammar and vocabulary for poetry and art prose. They broke up cliché phrases, revived unusual words, used common words in archaic or etymological senses, bent syntax to allow for fresh juxtapositions from which new meanings emerged until the literary work created the desire new world. It was a difficult world to achieve but worth experience since all its parts were the symbols of a radiant reality.
10-The symbolist poets believed that the task of poetry was to create impressions in the mind of the reader, so they used sounds and images in unique new combinations.
11-The symbolists considered meaning less important than the impression produced. Like the Impressionist painters, they abandoned inherited concepts of art to transmit the essential qualities of the individual's unique emotional experience directly.
12-They sought symbols of the inner world of reality and beauty in the objective external world. They opposed didacticism, eloquence, political
reference, sentimentality, objective depiction, impersonality and expressive realism.
13-Their poems present delicate personal moods or hallucinative play of the senses, or they evoke sensuous reverie or ideas through complex and magical imagery.
14-Baudelaire saw language and writing as magical operations and evocative sorcery, stressed their hieroglyphic quality, and stated that even ordinary sights could be symbols revealing the profundity of life. Rimband referred to the alchemy of the verb and urged poets to make themselves seers, and Mallarme insisted that the writer should merely suggest, not name an object. Since symbolists wished to make poetry so much a private concern of the poet that it became incommunicable to the reader.
15-The symbolist poets chose the symbols arbitrarily to stand for special ideas of their own. Every feeling or sensation, every moment of consciousness was different from every other, each moment had its special tone, and it was the poet's task to find or invent a special language capable of stating them. Such a language had to be symbolic. It had to be fleeting and ambiguous, and not be transferred by direct statement or description, but only by a succession of words and images which suggests.
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