1. Close Reading Symbolism ENGL 124 B03 Winter 2010

2. Literary symbol A particular kind of figure of speech, which combines a concrete image with an abstract concept (Cuddon)

3. Literary symbol A particular kind of figure of speech, which combines a concrete image with an abstract concept (Cuddon)

4. Literary symbol A particular kind of figure of speech, which combines a concrete image with an abstract concept (Cuddon) Widely popular in the literature of: English Romanticism Instead of a cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung – Coleridge

5. Literary symbol A particular kind of figure of speech, which combines a concrete image with an abstract concept (Cuddon) Widely popular in the literature of: English Romanticism 20th-c. “Imagist” poets And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? – Yeats

6. Why symbols? For the Romantics: emphasized the role of the artist as a visionary (Cuddon)

7. Why symbols? For the Romantics: emphasized the role of the artist as a visionary (Cuddon) suggested a mystic unity of opposites, such as material/spiritual, form/content, order/freedom (Eagleton 21–22)

8. Why symbols? For the Imagists: appeared to be a direct channel to human experience: “an emotion does not exist, or does not become perceptible and active among us, till it has found its expression, in colour or in sound or in form” (Yeats 182–3)

9. Why symbols? For psychoanalysts: the unconscious mind, according to Freud, cannot communicate with the conscious mind via language; it uses symbols exclusively (Cuddon, Hawkes 80)

10. References Cuddon, J. A. “Symbol.” The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 3d ed. London: Penguin, 1992. Print. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell, 1983. Print. Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Print. Yeats, William Butler. “The Symbolism of Poetry.” 1900. Strangeness and Beauty: An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910. Ed. Eric Warner and Graham Hough. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 179–187. Print.