from "Symbolism" in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle (1931)

I have here purposely been selecting writers who seemed to represent some tendency or school in its purest or most highly developed form. We must, however, now consider some Romantics who, in certain ways, carried Romanticism further than even Chateaubriand or Musset, or than Wordsworth or Byron, and who became the first precursors of Symbolism and were afterwards placed among its saints.

One of these was the French writer who called himself Gerard de Nerval. Gerard de Nerval suffered from spells of insanity; and, partly no dout as a result of this, habitually confused his own fancies and feelings with external reality. He believed, even in his lucid periods – and no doubt Whitehead would approve his metaphysics - that the world which we see about us is involved in some more intimate fashion than is ordinarily supposed with the things that go on in our minds, that even our dreams and hallucinations are somehow bound up with reality. And in one of his sonnets he outdoes Wordsworth, with his "Presences of Nature in the sky" and his "Souls of lonely places," by imagining shuttered eyes coming to life in the very walls and "a pure spirit under the bark of stones."

But a more important prophet of Symbolism was Edgar Allan Poe. It was in general that, by the middle of the century, the Romantic writers in the United States - Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and even Emerson - were, for reasons which it would be interesting to determine, developing in the direction of Symbolism; and one of the events of prime importance in the early history of the Symbolist Movement was the discovery of Poe by Baudelaire. When Baudelaire, a late Romantic, first read Poe in 1847, he "experienced a strange commotion." When he began to look up Poe's writings in the files of American magazines, he found amonth them stories and poems which he said that he himself had already "thought vaguely and confusedly" of writing, and his interest became a veritable passion.