Symbolism:

Starting in the late 19th century, the Symbolist movement began in literature, painting, and in music in France. In literature, the Symbolist movement was a reactionary movement against Realist/Naturalist writers who applied scientific objectivity to their literary objects. For Realist/Naturalist writers, human beings were in a pessimistic determinism and were subject to the laws of a fatalistic and mechanistic universe. Without any free will, each individual was but a "pawn on the chessboard" of nature. What the Symbolists ,opposed was Naturalist writers' stress on the materialism in men's motive and their designs to capture the transient. The Symbolists believed in the possibility of reflecting the inner eternal Reality or the invisible Absolute through verbal symbols.

Symbolist writers emphasized the importance of sound and rhythm, i.e., the musicality of the verse and the need for creating the effects of music through words. Many of them were attracted to music for its ability to appeal to the emotions by means of pure sound without the intermediary of words that would have intellectual associations. Never before in history had music had so many supports from writers and painters with quasi-religious fervor. The line of major influence ran from Edgar Allen Poe to Pierre Charles Baudelaire, and then to Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Jules Laforgue. Baudelaire translated some of Poe's works which had a tremendous effect on French literature in the succeeding epoch, technically and in choice of subject matter.

For Baudelaire music is an "expressive medium that is a transcendent form of poetry." It is "poetry in a latent state." Poetry aspires to the state of music because, according to Mallarmé, music enables one to convey "the naked flesh of emotion" free from everyday verbal images. The tenet of the Symbolist movement is best expressed by Mallarmé: "Poetry lies in the contemplation of things, in the image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us . . . . To name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual divination. The ideal is to suggest the object."

Debussy himself was very active in artistic circles in Paris which consisted mostly of writers and poets. He attended the famous "Tuesday meetings" at Mallarmé's house at 89 rue de Rome, where he met several other important Symbolists--Hebru de Regnier, Maurice Denis, James Whistler, Odilon Redon, Pierre Louÿs, etc.