SYMONS, ARTHUR (1865- ), English poet and critic, was born in Wales on Feb. 28, 1865, of Cornish parents. He was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 1884-86 he edited four of Quaritch's Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and in 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. His first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. His later verse is influenced by a close study of modern French writers (of Baudelaire, and especially of Verlaine) whose work he was one of the first Englishmen to appreciate and to introduce to English readers. He reflects French tendencies both in the subject-matter and style of his poems.
His volumes of verse include: Silhouettes (1892), London Nights (1895), Amoris victima (1897), Images of Good and Evil (1899), A Book of Twenty Songs (1905). In 1902 he made a selection from his earlier verse, published as Poems (2 vols.). He translated from
the Italian of Gabriele d'Annunzio The Dead City (19oo) and The Child of Pleasure (1898) , and from the French of Emile Verhaeren The Dawn (1898). To The Poems of Ernest Dowson (19o5) he pre fixed an essay on the deceased poet, who was a kind of English Verlaine and had many attractions for Symons. Among his volumes of collected essays are: Studies in Two Literatures (1897), The Symbolist School in Literature (1899) , Cities (1903), word-pictures of Rome, Venice, Naples, Seville, etc., Plays, Acting and Music (19°3), Studies in Prose and Verse (19o4), Spiritual Adventures (1905), Studies in Seven Arts (1906). His later works include: Studies in Elizabethan Drama (192o) ; Charles Baudelaire (1921) ; Translations from Baudelaire (1925) ; A Study of Thomas Hardy (1927); Studies in Strange Souls (Rossetti and Swinbwrne) (1929).
See T. E. Welby, Arthur Symons, A Critical Study (1925) pp. 147.