Figures of Several Centuries collects the critical essays of Arthur Symons, the poet and critic who introduced the French Symbolist movement to English readers. Ranging across the literary tradition, the book offers portraits of writers from Dante, Villon, and Donne to Coleridge, Pater, and the moderns of Symons’s own day.
Symons writes as an aesthete and connoisseur, attentive above all to the texture, mood, and inner music of an author’s work. His essays are impressionistic and richly suggestive rather than systematic, prizing sensibility and atmosphere over argument. As a central figure of the 1890s and a bridge between Victorian and modern criticism, Symons offers readers an elegant guide to the European literary imagination. This volume is a fine example of fin-de-siècle criticism at its most cultivated and evocative.