Review of Bizzotto and Evangelista eds Arthur Symons Poet Critic Vagabond by Marion Thain20200426 20635 1t1c8f (original) (raw)

Reviews 161 Elisa Bizzotto and Stefano Evangelista, eds, Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic, Vagabond, Studies in Comparative Literature, 44 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2018). 208 pp., ISBN 9781781884973, £75 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback). Arthur Symons might be best known as a poet, but I'll wager he has been most cited as an essayist. It is one essay in particular that gives him this purchase within literary history: his influential, and still profoundly interesting, if uneven, 'The Decadent Movement in Literature'. Yet he wrote countless other essays, and produced far more prose than poetry-most of it now almost never read. Reading Symons's essays is a disconcerting experience: much of the prose is derivative and meandering, but then all of a sudden a flash of brilliance, a thing captured or conceptualized in a unique and original way is striking enough to make the reader (this reader, at least) go back over the previous few pages to check that a weary eye and brain have not been responsible for the apparent dullness of the preceding prose. After all, how was the writer capable of this insight also capable of that? Unlike so many of the aesthetes and Decadents, whose counter-culture was supported by a private income, Symons was a jobbing writer, paying his rent through his work. The results were, as stated by the editors of this book, patchy. Yet it is the re-engagement with a large corpus of Symons's prose that emerges from this study as a particularly valuable contribution. What has long been needed has now been provided: an exploration of some of the expansive prose which can both flag up where the treasure is buried and also, more importantly, help work out what to do with Symons (a writer prone to petty posturing misogyny, among other things) in our current scholarly era. In short, then, a book devoted to the work of Arthur Symons is timely and much needed; and this carefully fashioned and integrated collection of essays offers an excellent response to that need. The recovery and exploration of the women writers of aestheticism and Decadence has been underway for some time, and the clear benefits of that work have made apparent the need to return also to the 'minor' male figures of the period in relation to current scholarly concerns. While Symons is hardly a figure unknown or forgotten, the foundational work from the 1960s and 70s brought very different frames of reference to those we have now, and our sense of the possibility of his work needs updating. This book finds an ideal way to do just that by presenting to us a 'networked Symons'