Symons, Arthur William

(1865-1945)

   Born at Milford Haven, Wales, the son of a Methodist minister from Cornwall, he was an introspective and self-absorbed child who found solace in literature. In 1884, he edited four volumes of the Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles for the publisher F.J. Furnivall, and in 1886, published an Introduction to the Study of Browning. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894. His Symbolist Movement in Literature was published in 1899. He wrote plays, edited anthologies, and made translations from authors in six languages. He published his experiences of his suffering from manic depression (bi-polar disorder) in Confessions: A Study in Pathology (1930). He died at Wittersham in Kent. Some of his publications: Days and Nights, 1889. London Nights, 1895. Images of Good and Evil, 1899. Poems, 1902 (2 volumes). A Book of Twenty Songs, 1905. Knave of Hearts, 1913. Love's Cruelty, 1923. Jezebel Mort, and Other Poems, 1931. Some of his poems: "During Music," "From an Old French Song-book," "Hallucination," "The Abandoned," "The AbsintheDrinker," "The Blind Beggar."

   Sources: An Antholog y of World Poetry. Mark Van Doren, ed. Reynal and Hitchcock, Inc., 1936. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Poems by Arthur Symons: Volume I . William Heinemann, 1911. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Symbolist Poem: The Development of the English Tradition. Edward Engelberg, ed. E.P. Dutton, 1967. Victorian Verse. George MacBeth, ed. Penguin Books, 1986.