English poet and critic, born in Wales on the 28th of February 1865, of Cornish parents. He was educated privately, spending much of his time in France and Italy. In 18841886 he edited four of Quaritchs Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles, and in 18881889 seven plays of the Henry Irving Shakespeare. He became a member of the staff of the Athenæum in 1891, and of the Saturday Review in 1894. His first volume of verse, Days and Nights (1889), consisted of dramatic monologues. His later verse is influenced by a close study of modern French writers, of Baudelaire and especially of Verlaine. He reflects French tendencies both in the subject-matter and style of his poems, in their eroticism and their vividness of description. His volumes of verse are Silhouettes (1892), London Nights (1895), Amoris victima (1897), Images of Good and Evil (1899), A Book of Twenty Songs (1905). In 1902 he made a selection from his earlier verse, published as Poems (2 vols.). He translated from the Italian of Gabriele DAnnunzio The Dead City (1900) and The Child of Pleasure (1898), and from the French of Émile Verhaeren The Dawn (1898). To The Poems of Ernest Dowson (1905) he prefixed an essay on the deceased poet, who was a kind of English Verlaine and had many attractions for Mr. Symons. Among his volumes of collected essays are Studies in Two Literatures (1897), The Symbolist School in Literature (1899), Cities (1903), word-pictures of Rome, Venice, Naples, Seville, &c., Plays, Acting and Music (1903), Studies in Prose and Verse (1904), Spiritual Adventures (1905), Studies in Seven Arts (1906). (See authored articles: de Goncourt, Thomas Hardy, Charles Marie René Leconte de Lisle, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Auguste comte de Villiers de LIsle Adam.)