Figures of Several Centuries

Arthur Symons was not the sort of critic who stood outside his subjects and dissected them. He plunged in. This collection of essays on poets, playwrights, and visionaries across several centuries reads less like literary history and more like a series of intimate portraits painted by someone who understood that to write about Donne, Ibsen, Baudelaire, or Emily Brontë was to enter into communion with their spirits. Symons brings both personal experience and critical wonder to these pages, rendering each figure in their particular quality of light: the feverish sensuality of the French Symbolists, the grim Nordic isolation of Ibsen's theater, the fierce private mythology of the Brontës. These are not detached assessments but acts of imaginative sympathy, written in prose that itself aspires to the condition of poetry. For readers who believe that criticism can be literature, that a fine essay about a great poet can itself be a small poem, this book offers exactly that rare pleasure.