Since 1990s, symbolism has spread to Britain, America, Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain and other countries. By the 1920s, it had become a literary trend of thought with international influence. From the content, symbolism can be divided into broad sense and narrow sense. As far as time is concerned, symbolism is different from early and late periods. The early symbolism mainly refers to the ideological trend prevailing in Europe after the failure of the Paris Commune, that is, in the 1980s and 1990s, and the later symbolism refers to the revival of symbolism that swept Europe and America and reached its peak in the 1920s, that is, after the First World War. Some people classify symbolism in the later period as modernism. 1886, the French poet Jules Morea (1856- 19 10) published the Manifesto of Symbolism in le figaro. At the same time, Malarme wrote a preface and René Gill published Tone Theory. These three papers not only laid the theoretical foundation of symbolism poetry, but also were important documents for later generations to study symbolism theory.
Symbolists believe that literature and art should not express real life, but a "another world" that transcends the feeling that time, space, matter and consciousness cannot reach. This kind of extrasensory thing can only be expressed by symbols. They believe that the reality is dark and changeable, illusory and painful, and only the "other world" is true, good and beautiful. It is to hint at another world with a trance-like and half-hidden landscape, and symbols are the media to communicate these two worlds. For example, crow symbolizes fate, darkness of soul, light represents rainbow, sadness represents black, purity represents self, authority represents yellow, and so on. These symbolic meanings are the inherent characteristics of things and words, which are well known to people. But in more cases, its symbolic meaning is often not the inherent attribute of things and words, but the characteristics given by human subjectivity, such as the heavy rain symbolizing God and the holy grail symbolizing divine power, and its significance is puzzling. The same thing, the same poem, can often have different interpretations.
Symbolic poetry is a kind of literary creation based on suggestion and association. It is different from romantic poetry, which opposes direct lyric and advocates indirect lyric. It is also different from realistic poetry, which opposes describing things objectively and concretely. It draws people's attention from the external material world to the internal spiritual world. How to express this inner spiritual world? Mainly by symbolic suggestion, that is, theme suggestion, thing suggestion and emotional suggestion. Ten things, only three, the remaining seven, depends on the reader's senses to infer, or just say one thing, readers will associate with endless things. In this way, readers seem to be half reading poetry and half writing, and get pleasure from it. Symbolic Taoist songs try to avoid general descriptions, especially naked preaching.
Symbolic poetry requires the unity of image beauty, music beauty and painting beauty. Symbolists believe that writing poetry is like composing music, and words are notes, which need poetry to produce symphony-like artistic effects. Han Bo once wrote a sonnet in which the vowels are colored, "A is black, E is white, I is red, U is green and O is blue". Some people think of the relationship between sound and color from the types of musical instruments, saying that the harp is white, the ukulele is blue, the flute is yellow and the organ is black. This interweaving of color and sound breaks the boundaries of vision, hearing and other senses, and mixes poetry, music and painting. Such poems are considered excellent.
Symbolism advocates free poetic style and amorphous prose poetry. They break the traditional rhyme and rhyme rules, and are replaced by the musicality of language itself to express instant impressions or emotional appeal. Symbolists believe that the impression or sentiment of an instant is intangible, and it is impossible to convey this sentiment in words, and it is useless to use the meter of poetry. It is only expressed by the voice itself, not by the lexical meaning of Song Ci. They oppose rhetoric, abandon the shackles of the form of pleasantries, and advocate flexible arrangement of pace, frustration and rhyme according to the needs of the poet's expression of thoughts and feelings. This led to the emergence of modern free poetry. Therefore, the liberalization of poetic meter is an important feature of symbolism and a great contribution to modern poetry.