While in France, he began associating with literary circles, and became acquainted with Les Hydropathes, a group of French writers that included Alphonse Allais, Charles Cros, Guy de Maupassant, and Léon Bloy.

[1]Moréas published poetry in his publications Lutèce and Le Chat noir, and collected his poems into two editions, Les Syrtes ("The Sandbanks") and Cantilènes, which were strongly influenced by Paul Verlaine.

He was initially a practitioner of the style of Symbolism, and wrote the Symbolist Manifesto (1886), which he published in the newspaper Le Figaro, partly to redeem the reputation of the new generation of young writers from the charge of "decadence" that the press had implied.

In 1891, as Symbolism became more openly associated with anarchism and as the French culture of the Belle Époque became increasingly dominated by revanchism and anti-German sentiment, Moréas published Le Pèlerin passionné which rejected Northern European and Germanic influences, such as Romanticism (as well as some aspects of Symbolism), in favor of solely Classical, Ancient Roman and Ancient Greek, influences.

This work helped initiate the École Romane, the aesthetic of which provided Charles Maurras with the ideology necessary for the far-right philosophy Action Française.