The Symbolist Movement in Literature, first published in 1899, and with additional material in 1919, is a work by Arthur Symons largely credited with bringing French Symbolism to the attention of Anglo-American literary circles.
Its first two editions were vital influences on W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot—a note that, for nothing else, would assure its historical place with the most important early Modernist criticism.
In 1893, Symons' article The Decadent Movement in Literature appeared in the November volume of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.
This ten page article touched on many of the authors subsequently discussed in "The Symbolist Movement in Literature", such as Huysmans, Maeterlinck, Verlaine and Villers de L'Isle-Adam.
Many of the essays in the 1899 edition of The Symbolist Movement in Literature were initially published as individual articles between 1897 and 1899 in periodicals such as The Star or The Athenaeum, before being revised and collated for the final monograph.