‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons

Abstract

This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.