Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century
art movement of
French,
Russian and
Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of
Charles Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal. The works of
Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock
tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by
Stéphane Mallarmé and
Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic
Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related
decadents of literature and of art.