Arthur Symons

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) is a haunting poet of the modern city, catching its dangerous, complex beauty in works that first introduced the imagery of the urban underworld into English poetry. He was a champion of the French Symbolists. Yeats, Pound and Eliot acknowledged their debt to him and were influenced by his sense of the city as the essential landscape of modernity. As a poet and critic, in his own right, though, Symons has come into his own in recent years. This selection is taken from the full range of Symons' poetry and prose, revealing an experimental writer exploring art, literature and music. Roger Holdsworth's introduction sets Symons in his context as both an 1890s Decadent and a precursor of Modernism.