For Students of Symbolism but also of English 324 and 326

Some Comparative Theories of Allegory & Symbol

Allegory

Allegory: An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived both to make coherent sense on the 'literal,' or primary level of signification, and also to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts, and events. There are two main types:

(1) Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and actions that are signified literally in turn signify, or 'allegorize' historical personages and events. So in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (1681) King David represents Charles II.

(2) The allegory of ideas, in which the literal characters represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a doctrine or thesis. (Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, 1678, parts of Milton's Paradise Lost, Hawthorn's "Young Goodman Brown")....the central device in the sustained allegory of ideas is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, and types of character; in the more explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the character's name. ----from M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 4th ed.

Symbolism

Symbol: "A word is a symbol, because it stands for its meaning. The sign + is a symbol, because it stands for the operation of addition. A lily, in religious art, is a symbol, because it stands for purity. The creature which, in some terrifying dream, threatens to devour the dreamer, is a symbol, because it stands for some situation in the environment or some conflict in the inner life which threatens to engulf the personality. The flag in battle is a symbol, because it stands for the ideals and the honour of the mother country. In theology, the Creed is a symbol, because it stands for a truth which its words cannot completely express."

-----from Mary Anita Ewer, A Survey of Mystical Symbolism.

All art may be said to be symbolic in this sense: it is a material mock-up of a bright idea. Any work of art symbolizes the process by which spirit generates matter, or materials generate idea. Any work of art symbolizes juncture itself, the socketing of eternity into time and energy into form. Of course, all that man makes is similar in this respect: a bowl, a highway, and a triangle are also material mock-ups of mental orders. But this is all that art is, in essence and by intent. A highway intends something quite other. Any art object is essentially a model in which the creative process is frozen with its product in its arms.....

Symbol does not only refer; it acts. There is no such thing as a mere symbol. When you climb to the higher levels of abstraction, symbols, those enormous, translucent planets, are all there is. They are at once your only tools of knowledge and that knowledge's only object....In the last analysis, symbols and art objects do not stand for things; they manifest them, in their fullness. You begin by using symbols, and end by contemplating them. -----from Annie Dillard "About Symbol".

A Symbolist Reading of The Romantic Symbol

From Charles Chadwick, Symbolism :

Symbolism can therefore be defined as the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by describing them directly, not by defining them through overt comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas and emotions are, by re-creating them in the mind of the reader through the use of unexplained symbols.

This, however, is only one aspect of Symbolism, what may be called the personal aspect that remains on the human plane. There is a second aspect, sometimes described as "transcendental Symbolism", in which concrete images are used as symbols, not of particular thoughts and feelings within the poet, but of a vast and general ideal world of which the real world is merely an imperfect representations. (3)

Two examples from the Symbolist Movement, (1850's-90's):

"it is through and by means of poetry that the soul perceives the splendours lying beyond the grave"

Baudelaire Notes Nouvelles sur Edgar Poe

"The whole purpose of poetry is to create pure essences, unhindered by any echo of the concrete reality which surrounds us." (Mallarme Oeuvres Completes 857)

If the poet wants to present to the reader the ideal flower, he must not draw too clearly the specific image of a rose or a lily, but must confuse the two images so that the essence of them both may be perceived. (Chadwick, 4)

A Romantic Reading of the Romantic Symbol

Compare the later symbolist ideas with Blake's note for A Descriptive Catalogue:

The Prophets describe what they saw in Visions as real and existing men whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the Apostles the same; the clearer the organ the more distinct the object. A spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour or a nothing; they are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see does not imagine at all . . . . Spirits are organized men. Moderns wish to draw figures without lines, and with great and heavy shadows; are not shadows more unmeaning than lines, and more heavy? O who can doubt this? (from Perkins, 193)

You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas, but you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. The wisest of the ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction because it rouses the faculties to act. -- I name Moses, Solomon, Aesop, Homer, Plato . . . . You certainly mistake when you say that the visions of fancy are not be found in this world. To me, this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination and I feel flattered when I am told so.

(From Letter to Revd Dr Trusler, 23 August 1799)