Arthur Symons Books

This book has ALL of Beardsley's work accompanied with insightful text. Beware, though -- some of his drawings are of extremely crude sexual nature -- definitely not a book you want on your coffee table when you have in-laws coming in from out of town.

Beardsley did much of his work for shock value, much like his buddy Oscar Wilde, so this is not necessarily TASTEFUL nnudity here. For those who can stomach it though, acquainting yourself with this artist is worthwhile.

This is a large volume (212 pages, incl. index) of Beardsley drawings, mostly in chronological order representing his six years of major creativity - being only 26 when he died.

Extract from 1967 cover: "Here is the art of Aubrey Beardsley full of beauty and decadence, sensuality and sin."

His work is easily recognizable; a unique style of black-and-white line drawings, influenced by Japanese woodcuts and Art Nouveau.

What a terriffic book! Loved the black and white drawings, and the history of this designer. I wish I could have gotten a book jacket, but,
well, you sometimes have to forfit. Price was right. Arrived in Speedy time and It is a keeper.

Symons was a poet and critic of the Symbolist movement, and this book was meant to be a general introduction to the French Symbolists. As an introduction, it is superb--it familiarized me with the works, lives, and styles of many important Symbolist writers such as Nerval, Merimee, Villiers, Verlaine, etc. There is an appendix which includes writers that aren't really Symbolist, like Flaubert, Balzac, Goncourt, but even this appendix is informative and interesting.

However, when the work tries to go beyond a mere descriptive primer, it fails. His attempts to define Symbolism are muddled and contradictory. His "interpretations" of Rimbaud and Verlaine are just completely off base. Basically, this book is a light, basic introduction to French Symbolist authors, and it loses its charms when it tries to be critical or definitive.

Without this little gem, we may not have ever had T. S. Eliot emerge as fully as he has. When I first stumbled across this book, I went through one of my deepest awakenings and haven't stopped since. The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a must for any concerned with poetry and the poetic process. There is a common thread in poetry that has been carried from ancient Greece to the present (though deeply buried now) and one of its strongest showings occurs with the writers reported on in this book. Symons does not get super scholastic (partly because scholars and the modern scholarly anathema wasn't as menacing of a problem as it is now) but he treats the writers and their material as one with the wide-eyed wonder of a quiet witness to one of the most remarable periods in ALL of literature.

D'Annuzio gives us the intimate details of the decadent lifestyle of a ne'er-do-well Roman count and his social class. The facts of the story could be told in a few sentences, but (like his contemporary Henry James) its the way he tells the story not the story itself that is the most appealing. His descriptions of Rome and the country villas of the rich make it a great book to take on a trip to Italy.

Well, the complete work would be a very thick book. This one gives plenty to enjoy, though. It starts with conventional drawings or lithos, including pieces ("Hail Mary" and "Francesca di Rimini") that capture a romanticism like the Pre-Raphaelites. Just a few pages in, though, we see illustrations from "Le Morte D' Arthur." These illustrations seemed to be the turning point in his career. When you see the whole set of work done for that book, you can see Beardsley's work mature into the style considered his signature. (It seems odd to talk about stages in a career that was so tragically short.)

Beardsley's work is commonly placed within Art Nouveau. It certainly displays the flowing curves and sensuality of that movement. I find the hard contrasts of black ink and open white atypical of Nouveau, and immediately recognizable. He took its sensuality well beyond normal bounds, as seen here in some pairs of his drawings, the original and the bowdlerized forms. His "Lysistrata," sampled here, exaggerates that into satiric bawdy surrounded by effete clothes (what few there are) and manners. The "Earl Lavender" drawing hints at some of the extremes in his "Under the Hill", which is not represented here.

The reproductions are large and legible, making the images easy to enjoy in their detail. I fault this book only for lack of an index or table of contents, making specific images hard to find, and for attributions that seem incomplete. Dates, in particular, are missing from nearly all of the works, even in the extensive catalogue in the back of the book. This is really a picture book, though, and the pictures are all that the reader could hope for.

-- wiredweird

Francesca da Rimini is the attempt by D'Annunzio to realize a type of woman different from others females characters during italian romanticism and the first years of the new century(you can see the differents from Francesca by S.Pellico). D'annunzio goes far and realized a poem full of sensuality, violence and poehtic lirism

Stenbock was an obscure literary figure of the 1890s who was rescued from oblivion by Adlard. Some of his writings have been reprinted as a result. He was a fascinating figure and Adlard did a fine job.

This isn't a book in which Sherlock Holmes appears, rather it is set in the 1970's and the main character is a TV actor that plays Holmes.

Although I quite enjoyed this book there is one glaring oversight that the author makes (I will mention it here because it won't give away who the guilty party is) - at the end of the book the crook is killed and "Holmes" is knocked unconscious. Only these two people knew who the crook was, yet when "Holmes" comes to he is hailed as a hero and everybody now knows the full story. Who told them?