SOURCE: Thibaudet, Albert. “Symbolism.” In French Literature from 1795 to Our Era, translated by Charles Lam Markmann, pp. 428-33. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967.

In the following essay, translated in 1967, Thibaudet summarizes the main poetic concepts and ideals associated with French Symbolism and surveys the movement's principal and allied proponents.

The New School and the Old Schools

Victor Hugo was born in the year of Le Génie du christianisme, and this man was so closely bound to the continuity of the century that it seems that the poetic revolution waited for the year of his death to announce itself. “I am going to clear the horizon,” he said.

He cleared it principally to the benefit of those poets born after 1860 who were later called the symbolist generation and whom one must be careful not to view too expressly as a reaction against Parnassus and against naturalism. Through their masters...