A symbol, in the broadest sense, is anything that signifies something else; in this sense all words are symbols. In discussing literature, however, the term symbol is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself. Symbol as a literary device was long used in various poets, such as Shelley, who repeatedly made symbolic use of objects, and William Blake, who exceeded all his contemporaries in the use of a persistent and sustained symbolism, both in his lyric poems and prophetic epics. In America, a symbolist procedure was prominent in the novels of Hawthorne and Melville and in the poetic theory and practice of Poe; these writers derived the mode mainly from the native Puritan tradition of typology. The Symbolist Movement, however, as a term applied specifically to a school of French writers beginning with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and continued by such major poets as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, and Valerie. Baudelaire based the symbolic mode of his poems on the writings of Poe, and especially on the ancient doctrine of correspondences, or inherent analogy, between the mind and the outer world, as well as between the natural and spiritual world; as Baudelaire put it: “Everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as in the natural world, is significant reciprocal, converse, correspondent.” The techniques of the French Symbolists, who exploited private symbols in a poetry of rich suggestiveness rather than explicit signification, had an immense influence throughout Europe, on poets such as Yeats, Pound, Dylan Thomas and so on. The decades after World War I were a notable era of symbolism in literature. Many of the major writers of the period exploit symbols which are in part drawn from religious and esoteric traditions and in part of their own invention. Some of the works of the age are symbolist throughout: in their settings, their agents, and their actions, as well as in their diction. Instances of a persistently symbolic procedure occur in lyrics such as Yeast’s “Sailing to Byzantium”.
