Hugh Kenner Quote

The remoter poetry in particular was replete with , an effect being something hypnotic we cannot quite understand, whiteness of moon and wave related to the setting of Time in a manner too subtle for the intellect. And all over Europe, by the late 19th century, poets had decided that effects were intrinsic to poetry, and were aiming at them by deliberate process. By the end of the century, in France, whole poems have been made too subtle for the intellect, held together, as effects are, by the extra-semantic affinities of their words. Picking up a name that was once thrown around as their authors, we have learned to call them Symbolist poems. In the Symbolist poem the Romantic effect has become a structural principle, and we may say that Symbolism is scientific Romanticism, thus an effort to anticipate the work of time by aiming directly at the kind of existence a poem may have when a thousand years have deprived it of its dandelions and its mythologies, an existence purely linguistic, determined by the molecular bonds of half-understood words.