Symbolism. Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.
   In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images.
   The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers.
   The term symbolist was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism and Impressionism.
   The term symbolism is derived from the word symbol which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the allia
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