Dramatis Personae

Arthur William Symons (1865-1945) was a British poet, critic, and magazine editor born in Milford Haven, Wales to Cornish parents. He was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. From 1884-86 he edited four of Bernard Quaritch’s Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and from 1888-89 seven plays of the ’Henry Irving’ Shakespeare. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894, but his major edtorial achievement was his work with the short-lived Savoy. This was a literary magazine that published both art and literature which Symons edited along with Aubrey Beardsley and Leonard Smithers from 1895-96, whose noteworthy contributors included W B Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad. Symons’s first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues, but his later poetry was clearly influenced by his close study of the modern French poets, such as Baudelaire, and more especially Verlaine. His poems reflect French tendencies in both subject matter and style, and in their eroticism and their vividness of description. He contributed both poems and essays to The Yellow Book, including a piece that was later expanded into The Symbolist Movement in Literature which was a major influence on Yeats and T S Eliot. Symons was also a member of the Rhymer’s Club founded by Yeats in 1890. In 1892 his first play The Minister’s Call was produced at the Independent Theatre Society, a private club, to avoid censorship by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Symons also worked as a translator, producing English language editions from the Italian of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s The Dead City and The Child of Pleasure, and from the French of Emile Verhaeren’s The Dawn. Having contributed an essay on the deceased poet to The Poems of Ernest Dowson in 1909, Symons suffered a psychotic breakdown later that year and published very little new work for a period of more than 20 years. His Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930) gives a moving description of his breakdown and treatment. This collection of 20 essays, a number of which had previously appeared in various periodicals in the the US and the UK, was published in America in 1923 and in Britain in 1925. The subjects covered include Maeterlink, the Rossettis, Sir Richard Burton, English and French fiction, the Russian ballets, and impressionistic writing, among many others. 3