Representative Symbolist Poets

William Yeats was a Protestant, Anglo-Irish poet. He was born on June 13th, 1865 in Sandymount, Ireland to a wealthy family. He spent fourteen years of his early life in London, and would later live there in his early adult life. He was very proud of his Irish heritage, as many of his poems and plays featured Irish heroes. Many of his plays also reflected his interest for mysticism, symbolism, and spiritualism. In 1885, Yeats published his first poetry for the first time in the Dublin University Review. When he moved back to his family in London in 1886, he continued to write poems, plays, novels, and short stories all with Irish characters and themes. In 1890, Yeats joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic, and this began to influence his work. In the early twentieth century, he began to get interested in theater, which his father got him interested in. He quickly became very active at the Abbey Theatre Company, and because plays required more direct dialogue, his poems began to also reflect this. He worked there for the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, and then moved back to Ireland. Yeats continued to write poetry, and even joined the Irish Senate in 1922. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. His strongest work included The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940). His works focused on the contrasts of life and art, masks, cyclic theory, and the ideals of beauty. He passed away on January 28th, 1939.

T.S Eliot was born on September 26th, 1888 in St. Louis, although he would later renounce his American citizenship, and became naturalized as a British subject. His most influential works included "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He was also known for his seven plays. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. While his poems have been widely considered to be some of the greatest English symbolist works, he has been accused of being anti-semitic due to way Jews are depicted in many of his poems and plays. Eliot emphasized turning the unpoetic into poetic in his work, and common emotions and feelings experienced by the common person are absent in his poems. Eliot also recognized the duality of the struggle of men. His works focused on the weakening psychology of man, the changing of gender roles, and fragmentation. He passed away in London on January 4th, 1865.

Oscar Wilde was born on October 16th, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. Wilde emphasized the importance of style in both life and art. His mother was a poet and Irish revolutionary and his dad was a surgeon who wrote wrote a work that was considered to be the standard for aural surgery for a couple of years. Growing up, Wilde endured a difficult childhood. His mother was doted on him and dressed him in woman’s clothes, while his father was a philanderer and was publicly condemned when a case about revealed his sexual activity with a young woman. Wilde was very strong student in college. At Trinity College in Dublin he won a Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, and at Magdalen College, he received the Newdigate Prize in 1878 for his poem “Ravenna”. At Magdalen College, he was under the influences of John Ruskin, a writer and critic, as well as Walter Porter, a critic and essayist who legitimized Wilde’s beliefs on art and individualism. He wrote many plays, poems, and even a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). It is not considered one of his stronger works, but it does give an 1890s view on the themes of sin and punishment and he gained plenty of notoriety from it. His most influential work was his comedic play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was later tragically imprisoned for his homosexuality. While in prison, he wrote a letter, now titled De Profundis, (1905) to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglass. This letter was intended for not just Douglass, as it addresses Paris on November 30th, 1900.