Poetics of the City: Urban Characters and Images in Arthur Symons’s Poems
Abstract
This study dealt with the representations of the city along with characters and images in ArthurSymons’s (1865-1945) selected poems. Symons was a significant poet of English fin de siécleperiod with his poems and literary works. He developed the inheritance he got from the Victorian verse and paved the way to modernism. Therefore, he became one of the key figures ofmodernism by means of his treatment of city life in his poems, for example, he employed certainplaces and locations from music halls to brothels, graveyards to prisons. As for the criticalframework, Henri Lefebvre’s space theory was applied in this paper because he explored spacefrom a social perspective which rendered scholars to concentrate on the city with all its components as well. This paper aimed at revealing the relationship between the city and poetry byanalysing the urban elements in Symons’s poems with regard to Lefebvre’s theory.