Symbolism

Symbolism is the first and most influential movement of Modernism, which arose in French poetry of the 1880s and proclaimed the symbol as the principal means of artistic cognition: behind visible phenomena the Symbolists sought to catch a hidden, higher spiritual reality — the inexpressible, the mysterious. Their poetics tends toward musicality of verse, suggestion, hint, and the polysemy of the image. Its founders are Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé; in drama, Maurice Maeterlinck. In Ukrainian literature Symbolism was developed by Mykola Voronyi, Oleksandr Oles, and the poets of the 'Moloda Muza' and 'Ukrainska Khata', and most vividly by the early Pavlo Tychyna, whose collection Sunny Clarinets (1918) became the summit of Ukrainian Symbolism, uniting musicality, cosmic imagery, and national feeling in the phenomenon that critics named 'clarinetism'.