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III. SYMBOL, YEATS, AND BAUDELAIRE
Yeats, in an essay entitled "Symbolism in Painting" (1898), introduces an idea of a symbol which is, essentially, that of the major French symbolists, but not their idea alone: a figure of expression which seemed to have found its time not only in poetry (and in literature as varied as French, English, German, some Spanish and some Russian ) but also in painting, and later in the novel. however, it was a new usage of 'symbol' which had found expression in this period. Until the Symbolists, 'Symbol' (as a term) had been associated with allegory and religious expression. After the death of "God" had become acceptable to modern culture, neither religion, nor allegory, nor the divine were strong enough to sustain a definition of symbol; symbol had to find a definition by which it could stand alone. It became the source of the "other" within progressive time, and the "Other" ceased to be its source of validation, or its explicit referent. In "Symbolism in Painting," Yeats defines the old usage of symbol, the modern usage of symbol, and distinguishes his own usage from these two. His discussion of symbolism 'in painting ' is interesting with respect to Baudelaire's critical writing on art: but the art that Yeats discusses is no more modern than Rossetti, or Michelangelo of whom he says, in contrasting him with Tintoretto, his "symbolism has helped to awaken the modern imagination. . ." He recognizes Bland and Wagner as great modern symbolists, artists who developed a personal symbolism distinct form the more 'traditional' and 'fragmentary' use of symbols by Keats. He shares Baudelaire's respect for Wagner, but their antecedents do not otherwise overlap. The redefinition of the symbol, and its incorporation into modern art, arose independently for the two artist, against a broader background of change which they shared,—not only literary but particularly socio-economic change (although Symbolism did bail romanticism out of decadence or a parnassian/pre-raphaelite aesthetic idealism in both France and England). Yeats comments on this separate evolution of the idea of 'symbol' in England and on the continent:
. . .and the other day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory, his definitions were the same as William Blake's, of whom he knew nothing. . . (p. 227, "Symbolism in Painting")
According to the Symbolist, symbols "give dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies. . ." or "said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding," whereas Allegory "read a meaning — which had never lacked its voice or body —into something heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than its own sake. . ." or "said things which could be said as well, or better, in another way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. . ." The contrast in the definitions is between understanding by instinct and by knowledge ; between symbol which could have been "said" only in its artistic representation, and allegory, which is better said in words. Allegory, then, must also be symbol to have been worth painting at all; it must overflow the simple verbal channels of thought so that
"a hundred generations might write out the meaning for the one, and they would write different meanings, for no symbol tells you all its meanings to any generation. . ." but ". . .when you have said . . ., you have told the meaning of the other, and the painting has not told it better. . ."
Similarly, Yeats comments on a line of poetry by Burns which portrays, as symbol, the setting of the moon, "whose relation to the setting of time is too subtle for the intellect. . ." He remarks upon "the continuous indefinable symbolism which is the substance of all style. . ." and, still commenting on the lines from Burns, distinguishes between the use of metaphor and symbol in writing:
". . . we may call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving , when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through them one can best find out what symbols are. . .one finds they are all like those by Burns. . .or take some line that is quite simple, that gets its beauty from its place in a story, and see how it flickers. . ."
Yeats distinguishes symbol from metaphor in that metaphor acts formally within a text whereas symbol brings meaning to the formal relationship by uniting body (form) with its substance (sensual, visual, and audible attributes). That mixing—"entangling"—of formal with perceived qualities stands at the root of what distinguishes, for Yeats, the 'new' from the 'old' symbol. Yeats starts the essay with the statement, ". . . most people dislike an art if they are told that it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and allegory. . ." (Why should most people dislike an allegorical art? . . . Because it does not speak directly to the senses.) That distinction between directness and indirectness is what differentiates the earlier and the later definition of "symbol." Like allegory, the symbol had been a referential sign, whose meaning is contained outside of itself. According to Yeats, in " Johnson's Dictionary ," a symbol is "that which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else. . ." in a "modern dictionary," symbol is defined as "the sign or representation of any mortal thing by the images or properties of natural things . . ." In the Oxford English Dictionary, (1976), "symbol" with its derivatives, takes up almost three pages and seems to be "something that stands for, represents, or denotes something else. . ." except that this relation is qualified ("not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion , or by some accidental or conventional relation.") It is especially "a material object representing or taken to represent something immaterial or abstract. . ." Most accurately, it is the sum of its own two roots: "to throw" "together." These definitions point out that the essential characteristic of the symbol is to "represent," a word that has also changed its ontological status over the last century and often means "to make present again" rather than "to stand in the place of." These two changes in definition point to a collapsing between the literal and the figurative modes of speech. "Reality' is invested only in literal language; in order to be valid, figurative language must demonstrate its connection to the "real." Yeats' second definition indicates the potential of "symbol" to fill the gap between literal and figurative language. The second element which is characteristic to all three definitions is its involvement with the relation of two, in the first case, things; and in the second, orders of reality. The third definition implies that the relation between "mortal" and "natural" things (or "material" and "immaterial or abstract" objects) is not so easily specified or made certain. "Vague suggestion" or "some accidental or conventional relation" does not suggest the very definite form of relation communicated in the poetry of Baudelaire and Yeats. Yeats' poetry demonstrates the different values which the word "symbol' takes on across these three definitions. It is a relation that changes throughout his development as a poet, and one to which he attributes a different value than does the German Symbolist in his essay, a difference illustrated by the contrast in his examples. The painter considered as symbols
"The shapes and motions of the body. . ." or "ears hidden by the hair to make one think of a mind busy with inner voices. . .he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought such emblems were allegorical and had their meaning by a tradition and not by a natural right. . ."
The rose was the emblem of Yeats' earlier poetry; an emblem which for him may have been a symbol but which had not entered far enough into the language of his poetry to project itself as "symbol" to the reader. Yeats defines "emblem" here, as an object which sets up an allegorical equation with an abstract idea, a relation which has its "meaning by tradition and not by a natural right." Yeats rejected the conventional nature of the emblem and began to develop images which had their origin in a mythology of his imagination, and which were associated with symbols which "had been so long a part of the imagination of the world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without becoming an allegorist. . " This forms a part of his argument against the painter, for he claims that the emblems ("a lily, a rose, or a poppy. . .") are symbol, by a natural right since they "were so married, by their color and their odor, and their use" to the imagination of the world. Those elements of substance—color, odor, use—communicate a symbol apart form its association with tradition and are brought into the power of Yeats' language in some of his mature poems. The tower and the winding stair are the images central to Yeats' later poems; but he was a great enough poet not to rely on them as symbols in his poetry. Certainly, they were symbols to him, and bore in them the weight of his imagined world, but even he distinguishes between the mystic and the artist: he says of Rossetti (whom the argument has in fact been about and which is significant because Yeats' father was a painter of the pre-Raphaelite school, and the pre-Raphaelites were among his literary precursors) that ". . . the systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists, because his imagination is too bounded by a picture or a song. . ." This same reproach could be made against Yeats in some of his less realized imagery; the image of the tower is a poetic image of effective symbol only when it is created by the language of the poem itself and intertwined with its imagery. In "The Tower" and "Blood and the Moon" particularly, the image of the tower takes on the force of the symbol. The latter poem starts
I
Blessed be this place,
Into the disjunction between language and image, a disjunction which "emblem" epitomizes, slips doubt, and this doubt is heard as the mocking voice of the older Yeats and of Baudelaire. The tower, powerfully set up as an emblem, does not win immediacy until the end of the poem:
IV
Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,
"Symbol" for the poet differs from "symbol" for the reader, because, to him, it is whatever takes on a symbolic meaning, whereas, for the reader, it is whatever he (the poet) can invest with symbolic meaning. "Symbol" therefore becomes a function of poetic language; and, although language and any work of art in its entirety, may be considered symbolic, its structure may contribute differently to the communication of that meaning. There is a curious little poem of Yeats' which follows "Blood and the Moon," which is entitled "Symbols." Its language seems trite and empty: it does not create the symbols, but mentions them as they have meaning for the poet only, or perhaps in the context of the rest of his work. On the other hand, certain poems create symbols that are not laden with significance in his imaginative system, but the success of whose expression in poetry equals the weight of Yeats' entire visionary scheme. "Mera" reaches that point of expression (and not of simple "thought") in its last lines:
Hermits upon Mount Mera or Everest,
Despite the possibility of external symbolic meaning, of reference, the success of the image as symbol lies within the language that creates it (in its overcoming of abstraction with its substance. This success is contained also within "Leda and the Swan" and "The Second Coming" — in their language, which overcomes while expressing the dichotomy between word and object. Creation fills the gap of which man is conscious and paradoxically expresses his separation from the world. But for all the times that that is said, never is it demonstrated in the language of art nor in the forms that it creates. Yeats doubts, and must doubt, his ability to overcome that gap. In the "Circus Animals' Desertion," he expresses his separation from his own creation.
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
Despite the desperation of the emotion, or even more because of it, the last line is irrepressibly funny. The image of his images, as "circus animals," mocks them; and conscious of the disjunction that they express, and overcome, he cannot recreate them.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Humor overcomes language that could have been harsh or pathetic — humor which Baudelaire says:
(. . . comme le rire) est essentiallement humain, il est essentiallement contradictoire, c'est-a-dire qu'il est a la fois signe du'une grandeur infinie et d'une misere infinie , misere infinie relativement a l'Etre absolu dont il possede la conception, grandeur infinie relativement aux animaux. C'est du choc perpetuel de ces deux infinis que se degage le rire. Le comique, la puissance du rire est dans le rieur et nullement dans l'objet de rire. . .(De L'Essence de la Rire")
The strongest statement of the poem, and the emotion that keeps Yeats' poetry so inextricably bound up in life at the same time that it is radically separate from it, is a comment on himself at the end of the second stanza:
. . . Character isolated by a deed
His love for Maud Gonne, which was a source of constant sorrow to him, was frustrated by the same source of greatness and sense of unfulfilment in her life, the abstraction of her mind, her bitter intellect (which may have been, in part, a projection of Yeats' own bitterness onto her). This gave rise to some of his greatest poetry—"Among School Children" and "A Prayer for my Daughter"—and also reflected his understanding of the division of the age, and his embodiment of it in the symbols of his mythology, Sphinx and Buddha. But knowing the inadequacy of the expression of these as symbols in thought alone, Yeats developed in the language of his poetry a form of expression adequate to the symbols of his age. At the end of "The Symbolism of Poetry" Yeats asks, "If people were to accept the theory that poetry moves us because of its symbolism, what change should one look for in the manner of our poetry?" His response is not directed toward the poetry of any one age; his discussion of "symbolism" has attained so universal a context, that his characterization of "symbolist" poetry only emphasizes "the importance of form, in all its kinds, for although you can expound an opinion, or describe a thing when your words are not quite well chosen, you cannot give a body to something that moves beyond the senses, unless your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life, as the body of a flower or a woman. . ." It is ironic that the form which most embodies "something that moves beyond the senses" is, most simply and untranslatably, a living thing, whose sounds, colors or forms "call down among us certain disembodied powers, whose footsteps over our hearts we call emotions. . ." He continues with a characterization of what makes poetry "modern" in the broader sense of the term:
The form of sincere poetry, unlike the form of the popular poetry, may indeed be obscure, or ungrammatical as in some of the best of the Songs of Innocence and experience, but it must have the perfections that escape analysis, the subtleties that have a new meaning every day . . .
The problem to which Yeats addresses himself is the symbolism of any great and lasting art from the Iliad to a lyric song. According to Yeats, modern art fails to "overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of the world and lay (its) hands upon men's heart strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times. . ." His poetry, an expression of the incompleteness of the old language, still fails to create the new language that he, and mankind, seek; that in their seeking they create, and, if found, would silence the impulse of creation. The danger of working toward Symbolism is that symbolism has been an element of a definition of the greatness of every artist whose work has endured since he has managed to craft, from the (referential) symbols of his time, symbols with sufficient immediacy (presence) and permanence (timelessness) to "transcend" their immediate context and be accessible to an audience in a totally different system of reference and of values. To put this in the terms of more structural criticism, the signs they create are not concerned with the relation between two sign systems (of the work of art and of its contemporary cultural context, systems through which the art work yields only one interpretation and which develop a code for translation from one language into another,) but between a single system of signs and a "reality" which is indefinable, unordered, and not entirely "subject to the will or understanding of men." This latter relationship is translatable, yielding "subtleties that have a new meaning every day. . ." Two studies, then, must be undertaken: one, of forms which communicate themselves to any "homo sapiens" in any day and age; one, of the forms which communicate most specifically to a certain day and certain age. These may even become so much a part of its "tradition" as to establish terms of understanding which render them universal, or accessible to succeeding generations; whether this is the case with the specific Symbolist movement is debatable although its more general form has been of constant significance. Baudelaire's criticism inevitably points to the dichotomy in human nature and expression and to its expression in the Modern Age. His discussion of painting is directed toward painting of the Modern Age, and toward the "Beautiful" in it: terms which already distinguish this contradiction—the transient from the eternal elements—in art. He bases his definition of the beautiful upon this distinction:
. . . C'est ici une belle occasion, en verite, pour etablir une theorie rationelle et historique du beau, en opposition avec la theorie du beau unique et absolu; pour montrer que le beau est toujours, inevitablement, d'une composition double, bien que l'impression qu'il produit soit une; car la difficulte de discerner les elements variables du beau dans l'unite de l'impression n'infirme en rien la necessite de la varieti dans sa composition. Le beau est fait d'un element eternel, invariable, dont la quantite est excessivement difficile a determine, et d'un element relatif, circomstancial, que sera si l'on veut, tour a tour ou tout ensemble, l'epoque, la mode, la moral, la passion. Sans ce second element, que est comme l'enveloppe amusante, titillant, aperitive, du divin gateau, le premier element serait indigestible, inappreciable, non adapte et non approprie a la nature humaine. Je defie qu'on decouvre un echantillon quelconque de beaute que ne contienne pas ces deux elements. . . ( Le Peintre de La Vie Moderne , p. 1114 [?])
The beauty of art is founded on its ability to hold in tension these two elements of the transient (the historical) and the eternal (the absolute). In recognizing this tension, in establishing his "rational and historical" theory of beauty, Baudelaire is displacing the traditional definition of beauty, removing it from the sphere of allegory to relocate it in the presence of symbol. ". . . Il cherche ce quelque chose qu'on nous permettra d'appeler la modernite ; car il ne se present pas de meilleur mot pour exprimer l'idee en question. Il s'agit, pour lui, de degager de la mode ce qu'elle peut contenir de poetique dans l'historique, de tirer l'eternel du transitoire. . ." (La Modernité," p.1163). The definition of 'modernité' is both paradoxical, and not entirely new: ". . . La modernite, c'est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l'art, dont l'autre moitié est l'eternel et l'immuable. Il y a eu une modernité pour chaque peintre ancien . . . ." The displacement of the center from the other-worldly ideal to what is defined both by and in the immediate present is a critical reversal similar in nature to locating the 'subjective' center of scientific observation and therefore objectivizing its method. This switch can be extended to contribute to an understanding of artists who have worked in the past, since the times which were contemporary to them were the 'modern' times within which their work came to expression: ". . . votre but est de comprendre le caractère de la beauté presente . . . . Si un peintre . . . s'inspire d'une coutisane de Titien ou de Raphael, il est infiniment probable qu'il fera un oeuvre fausse, ambigüe et obscure . . . ." ("La Modernité") What, then, is it that allows a work to speak clearly? Asking this question switches the focus from the general critical stance of "modernity" to a definition of a specific relation of a work or art to the period in which the artist lived. And the answer to that question is also paradoxical: it is not a question of technique, but a question of the mode of reality which the art presents. ". . . le romanticisme ne consistera pas dans une execution parfaite, mais dans une conception analogue a la morale du siècle . . . ." ("Qu'est-ce que le Romantisme?") To paint a Titian in 1977 would be a lie unless it were not a Titian (even if it looked like one; and in this case the present artist is safe) and meant something radically different, or unless he created around him the conditions of sixteenth century Venice, as well as within him the talent and vision of Titian. In France, in 1859, it was not a lie for Baudelaire to write what is, essentially, a symbolist poem. What is the difference in situation; what is the 'lie,' and how is it [dis]placed? There is a lie which exists within art, the contradiction between the eternal and transitory which art aspires to overcome. In order to speak truly, art must swallow that lie—find some form by which it can internalize it, a form that is accepted by the age in which it is recognized. Art is then bound to moral order, but in a paradoxical fashion: it must lie in order to tell the truth, and the greater its lie, the greater its truth. But the lie of the displaced Titian is on another order from this lie, internal and necessary to art; if an artist of a different age from Titian is inspired by one of Titian's paintings, and he is more than a conventional artist, he must transform the relation between the transitory and the real in it to one which speaks in his time. The recognition is, first, of the form which is his; and, secondly, of the form which has lost the presence of its lie and lost the sense that its transitory element is not eternal; this second form cannot tell the truth, cannot approach reality, and becomes convention. Baudelaire, like Yeats, asks
. . . Qu'est-ce que l'art pur suivant la conception modern? C'est creer une magie suggestive contenant a la fois l'objet et le sujet, le monde exterieur a l'artiste et l'artiste lui-meme. ("L'Art philosophique")
Baudelaire's definition of the modern conception of pure art is a "suggestive magic containing at the same time object and subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself. . . ." The dichotomy is again repeated in terms of the opposition of subject and object. This distinction has played a large role in the definition of the forms of Baudelaire's poetry. In "Le Voyage," the world seen with the eyes of the child is limitless, unbounded in its subjectivity. This world is represented by allegory in the poem and elsewhere that language attains a subjective coherence ("correspondences"). To the "eyes of memory,' the world has lost its illusions: objectively seen, these illusions are naive and provoke a tone of irony. The ironic voice enters in at the end of "Une Charogne":
Alors, o ma beaute, dites a la vermine
This voice is similar to the mockery of Yeats' poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion" in its literal use of language which traps the poet in the "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" in his ability to transcend the purely physical object.
Les jambes en l'aire, comme une femme lubrique
The common theme of 'mask' backs up the mocking tone by which both Yeats and Baudelaire convey the inadequacy of the old form of re-presentation, and the need to create a new . . .(end of "Le Voyage"). But in "Le Cygne," the third voice enters which suggests the overcoming of this polarity, a merging of subject with object and the possibility for the artist to project himself into the external world. The swan collapses the literal and figurative uses of language, and overcomes the disjunction of word and object. It creates an image which is self-referential and defined not by its relation to anything around it but by its relation to absence and to the tension within itself. The swan introduces a third sort of figure in language, the non-referential 'sign' or image, which is the core of the poem. This figure is the symbol, in the modern sense, and may be defined as 'a sign whose referent is contained within it, and in which is fused the active subject with its action. . .' "Image" as a term is not adequate to denote this relation because an image involves not relation: it is a half of the dichotomy only, and may, but does not necessarily take on a symbolic rather than a figurative role in the poems. This third voice participates in a present which is not continuous with past or future but stands outside of both progressive (objective) and recuperable (subjective, by means of symbol) time. It is a moment only, and does not, like allegory, constitute a separate and continuous time sequence.
. . . Le passé est interessant non-seulement par la beauté qu'ont su en extraire les artistes pour qui'il était le présent, mais aussi comme passé, pour sa valeur historique. Il en est de même du présent. Le plaisir que nous retirons de la representation du present tient non-seulement à la beauté dont il put être revetu, mais aussi à sa qualité essentielle de présent. . . ("Le Beau, La Mode et le Bonheur")
This 'essential quality of being present' characterizes the symbol as it appears in the poetry of both Yeats and Baudelaire, and is derived from the tension between transient and eternal time contained within it at the moment of its creation. This frees the symbol from its context of specific meaning.
. . . A person or a landscape that is part of a story or a portrait, evokes but so much emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait ; but if you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their effects . . . , it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol of an infinite emotion . . . symbols are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection. . .
That tension exists also in the union of form and substance within language.
. . . La dualité de l'art est une consequence fatal de la dualité de l'homme. Considerez, si cela vous plait, la partie éternellement subsistante comme l'ame de l'art, et l'élément variable comme son corps . . . ("Le Beau, La Mode et le Bonheur")
The symbol, in bridging this duality, bridges the gulf between word and object and between ideal and thing in the poetry.
. . . Toutes les beautés contiennent, comme tous les phenomènes possibles, quelque choses d'éternel et quelque chose de transitoire,—d'absolu et de particulier. La beauté absolue est eternelle, ou plutôt elle n'est qu'une abstraction. L'élément particulier de chaque beauté vient des passions . . . ("De l'Heroisme de la Vie Moderne")
Consciousness of this duality, and its division here into "abstraction" and "passion," brings Baudelaire close to Yeats in his terminology. For Yeats this polarity is expressed in the images of "Buddha" and "Sphinx." In Baudelaire's poetry it occurs as "Spleen" and "Ideal." But for each poet there is a term which mediates: in Baudelaire it is the "Fleurs du Mal" and in Yeats it is the dancer. Both Yeats and Baudelaire oppose themselves to the abstraction, and to the decadence, of the age. Although decadence came to France earlier in the nineteenth century than to England, Baudelaire also was also situated nearer the beginning of the expression of decadence, and, although he was its critic, he was also its proponent. His poems are caught in the construction and deconstruction of decadent images. Decadence is a movement that occurs at the end of a period whose aesthetic standards have become so abstract that they pre-empt its natural forms. Abstraction is severely criticized by Baudelaire in "L'Art Philosophique:" he would agree with Yeats who quotes Goethe, "a poet needs all philosophy, but he must keep it out of his work . . ." Yeats and Baudelaire are also very close in that they did develop imaginative systems based on ideas or words that assumed symbolic value only for the creator of them. But these allegorical systems did not, for either of them, enter into their poetry. Expression in their poetry is linked, rather, to the "creature" which Baudelaire described in Fusées, or to the composite symbol of Buddha and Sphinx in Yeats' "The double Vision of Michael Robartes." Opposed to these symbols of the imagination is, for each of the poets, the expression of an 'antithetical self:' in Yeats, the beast born at the end of the "Second Coming," in Baudelaire, the condemned god. Both of these negative symbols reflect the threat posed by the age in which these poets were writing, a threat that is given form as the unconscious force of the creative imagination.
The striking similarities between these two poets, in the orientation of their critical awareness of the modern world, in its representation in their poetry, and in the structure of symbol and the use of language in their poems is not accidental; it is a function of their analogous positions in the development of a consciousness of modern times, which each was instrumental in bringing to his country. The similarities are brought out in the comparison of "Leda and the Swan" to "Le Cygne:" both poems are lyric poems. Both are derived from a personal allegory or vision of the poet which does not govern the interpretation of the poem. Both poems are about poetic process. Both use language concretely. Both create an image which links mythology to history. Both images are non-referential and are concerned with separation. Both poems are involved implicitly with political change in the times in which they were written. That change is conveyed by the tumult, disorder, and violence in the description; by the importance of memory, recollection and the moment to the structure of the poems; and of mocking, self-consciousness, and self-criticism to their tone. These similarities do not, of course, preclude radical differences in their use of language: Yeats' poetry does not rely on figures of speech extensively, because he does not invest them with the symbolic value that they acquire in the poetic language of Baudelaire. Yeats relies on symbol before metaphor, and on the symbolic qualities of language—rhythm and rime, assonance and song (see especially part III, pp. 247-9 of "The Symbolism of Poetry"). These qualities of symbolism in their language differentiate Yeats from Baudelaire, and render Yeats' language more active than Baudelaire's, which operates on a more sophisticated level of suggestion (particularly characteristic of the French language): but Yeats recognizes "the element of evocation, of suggestion" in language as what he calls "the symbolism in great writers . . ." Their theoretical proximity is expressed above all in the primacy of symbol over allegory in their poetry. As is typical of modern definitions, the symbol has become a function of human understanding. This revised definition represents a reversal of the definition of allegory. The definition of symbol changed as the origin of allegory's definition corroded. The substance of the symbol is expressed in its perceived (sensual, visual. . .) qualities—in the image ; these are expressed in a form . This unit constructs a bridge between perception and expression for the poet which, projected into his language, becomes a bridge for the reader and gives him access to the creativity of the poet's imagination. Non-rhetorical figures express the relation of a text to the period in which it is written. They demonstrate the status of "reality" in that period and therefore the assumptions about language, its origin and its epistemology, under which it operates. In the nineteenth century, the symbol, which links linguistic to non-linguistic reality, provided a form by which artists could sustain "fiction" in an age when faith in fictions was failing. |
