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In my view, in order to understand about French Symbolism from its appearance in Vietnam, it is essential to make a comparison between French society in the 1880s and the Vietnamese context of the 1930s.

In the appendix to the newspaper Figaro201_{, Jean Moréas wrote a Symbolist} manifesto on 18 September 1886, although Stéphane Mallarmé had written a summary of experiments in composing Symbolist poetry even before that.

There are two important characteristics of this appearance of French Symbolism: the bourgeois and the ideal world. The reason they are significant is that both of them were forbidden in Vietnam, at least, during the time of the Vietnamese ‘New Poetry Movement’ and during the Vietnamese revolution from 1945 onwards. I aim to show the reality that Vietnamese poets in the 1930s had no similar conditions to those of French poets in 1880s, yet they wrote poems like

201 _{Natasha Grigorian, European Symbolism: In Search of Myth (1860-1910) (New York: Peter Lang}

they were Baudelaire in the 1880s, in imagined free spaces that they could never enter.

Being an artistic tendency appearing in the late nineteenth century, and spreading to become a cultural phenomenon in Europe, the era of Symbolism was the era of bourgeois society’s crisis in ideology and culture.

Moreover, the concept of Symbolists seemed to be against reality:

The Realist had no use for that belief in a superior world above the senses which has been familiar in Europe since Augustine absorbed the doctrines of Neo-Platonism; they had a stern conviction that what mattered was truth and that truth could be found empirically in this world.202

The Symbolist was equally hostile to the realistic or scientific view of art because by its very nature it denies or destroys the ideal world which is the centre of his activities.203

As such, I think of this mentioned ideal world as the world of imagination, which was based on the construction of the real world but contained a message of unconsciousness. This helped to change the position of the poet from a ‘secretary of time’ to ‘a kind of seer, who could see through and beyond the real world to the world of ideal forms and essences.’204 _{Through symbols, poets connected the inner} world, which was supreme, and the external world, which was real and physical. Also through symbols, Symbolist poets awakened unconscious dreams. It was felt that a dream

…makes us understand through a common and frequent experience how our consciousness can be invaded, filled, made up by a group of productions which differ remarkably from the mind’s ordinary reactions and perceptions. It gives us the familiar example of a closed world where all real things can be represented, but where everything appears and is modified only by variations in our deep sensibility. (…) That is, it is thoroughly irregular, inconstant, involuntary, fragile, and we lose it as easily as we acquire it – by accident.205

202 _{Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism (London: MacMillan, 1943), p. 2.} 203 _{Bowra, p. 7.}

204 _{J. A. Cuddon, M. A. R. Habib, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 3rd}

edn.,(London: Penguin, 1992), p. 941.

Moreover, by escaping a reality that contained human pain, sorrow and wickedness, Symbolism tried to reach the ideal beauty:

To this belief they clung with a conviction, which can only be called mystical because of its intensity, its irrationality, its disregard for other beliefs and its reliance on a world beyond the senses.206

Therefore, images in Symbolism were in contrast to objective descriptions. Symbolic images were vague and uncertain. Those images showed the existence of the ‘Idée’ (Stéphane Mallarmé)207_{, of ‘the invisible power’ (Maurice Maeterlinck).}208 Poetry also had to have music because music could crescendo to convey various ‘nuances’ (Paul Verlaine).209 _{Hence, Charles Baudelaire made one of the first} imprints when he poeticised badness and evil in Les Fleurs du Mal(The Flowers of Evil).210 _{In this collection, besides the visible and sensible world, which was full of}

symbols,211 _{and even the ideal world, which was ‘more real than that of sense’,}212 there were some main features which created ‘a shift from a romantic to a modern ironic aesthetic’.213

Correspondences appeared for the first time in The Flowers of Evil214 _{as a new}

look at the universe and life, poetry and natural symbols. ‘The poem is compounded of object and idea, presence and absence’:215

As the long echoes, shadowy, profound, Heard from afar, blend in a unity, Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity,

So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond. 216

Most things belong to one or another kind, according to the way we speak of them and the companions we give them, for symbols, associated with ideas that are more than fragments of the shadows thrown upon the intellect by

206 _{Bowra, p. 3.}

207 _{Roger Pearson, Stéphane Mallarmé (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2010), p. 49.}

208 _{W. D. Halls, Maurice Maeterlinck: A Study of his Life and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1960), p.}

38.

209 _{Philip Stephan, Paul Verlaine and the Decadence, 1882-90 (Manchester: Manchester University}

Press, 1974), p. 105.

210 _{Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).} 211 _{Bowra, p. 6.}

212 _{Bowra, p. 3.}

213 _{McFarlane, Malcolm, p. 206.}

214 _{Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, ibid.} 215 _{McFarlane, Malcolm, p. 209.}

the emotions they evoke, are the playthings of the allegorist or the pedant, and soon pass away.217

Thus, it could be recognised that whereas Romanticism was represented by contrasting images, Symbolism expressed the relationship between man and objects in correspondences.

Music was the second aspect:

Symbolism, then, was in origin a mystical kind of poetry whose technique depended on its metaphysics and whose first popularity was due to the importance that it gave to the poet’s self and to the element of music in his art.218

Baudelaire also acknowledged the influences of Edgar Allan Poe in various literary opinions, among which were the certainty that poetry flowed from ‘exaltation of soul’ and the ‘insistence on the importance of rhyme’.219 _{The harmonies of words} expressed in unexplainable subtlety could, therefore, be seen as a feature of poetic content, not only as a feature of poetic form. Following Baudelaire, Mallarmé pursued pure ideality,220 _{in which he released poetry from pragmatic factors and} advocated verse to be magic words, music and harmonies. Thus, later Symbolist poets conveyed their works in keeping with their own ambiguity and mystery. Moreover, I think that this mysterious harmony influenced Symbolist poets’ self- consciousness. The uncertainty of the ego in finding itself, and the leading of music before awareness, might have caused poets to get lost in their self-made maze of symbols and be alone in their creations. While this approach could be seen as a demand to move away from the descriptiveness of Romanticism, it also created an artistic world of decoding symbols, and human spirits which could not be reached or identified. As they created this world, Symbolists

…awakened an acute consciousness of language. Language was no longer treated as a natural outcrop of the person but as a material with its own laws and its own peculiar forms of life.221

217 _{West, p. 20.} 218 _{Bowra, p. 12.}

219 _{Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists of Baudelaire, trans. by P.E. Charvet}

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 17.

220 _{See Pearson, ibid.}

According to this, the reconstruction of language also reconstructed the ‘emotion defined by the first meaning of the word.’222 _{Thus, language in Symbolism should}

…convey a supernatural experience in the language of visible things, and therefore almost every word is a symbol and is used not for its common purpose but for the associations which it evokes of a reality beyond the senses.223