The symbolist movement may be described as the effort to bring poetry to the condition of music. The theory of the suggestiveness of words comes from a belief that a primitive language, half-forgotten, half-living, exists in each man. It is language possessing extra ordinary affinities with music and dreams.
Words for Mallarme-a member of the French Symbolist movement - were then much more than signs. Used evocatively and ritualistically, they are the means by which we are inducted into an ideal world. "Poetry is", as Mallarme defined it in 1886, "the expression by means of human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious sense of the aspect of existence: it endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task".
Such also were the interests of the English-speaking poets and critics who were most powerfully influenced by the French symbolists, literary figures like T.E. Hulme, Ezra Poand, and T.S. Eliot and even men like William Butler Yeats, whose attempt to construct a personal myth in a vision (1925) might seem to argue a different concern.
Any attempt to summarize symbolist doctrine exposes the vagueness of the pronouncements of the various symbolists and critics, not to mention their frequent contradictions. One might be forgiven for coming to doubt whether the term "symbolism" has any specific meaning at all, and to conclude that it is, like the term "romanticism", simply the name for a bundle of tendencies, not all of them very closely related.