This sculpture is a bas-relief with a figure on one side and poem on the opposite side. This has been inspired by the poem Javanese Dancers by Arthur Symons. This is one of fifteen sculptures that are part of the Greg and Fay Wyatt Sculpture Garden that celebrate dance and poetry.
Born in Milford Haven, Wales, to Cornish parents, Symons was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 1884–1886, he edited four of Bernard Quaritch's Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and in 1888–1889 seven plays of the "Henry Irving" Shakespeare. He became a member of the staff of the Athenaeum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894, but his major editorial feat was his work with the short-lived Savoy with Aubrey Beardsley as art editor.
Symbolism was a literary movement that was opposed to the rigid conventions governing theme and technique of poetry and instead vied to communicate the ineffable sensory experience of an individual through art.
Symons’ seminal work “The Symbolist Movement in Literature” (1899), an expansion of his acclaimed essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature”(Harper’s, November 1893), introduced his readers to the Symbolist movement which Symons’ described as ” an attempt to spiritualize literature.”
Symons, at one time, regarded both Symbolism and Impressionism as subsets of the parent category of Decadence and considered them to be rebellions against realism. He defined this common, decadent thread as, “an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.”
In England, the decadents were 1890s literary figures such as Arthur Symons (“the blond angel”), Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson, who were members of the Rhymers’ Club or contributors to The Yellow Book.
Despite a shared ideological descent from Baudelaire and being associated as parts of the same sphere of anti-establishment literature, both these movements soon came to be distinguished from one another.
