"This learned work of guerrilla scholarship offers nothing less than a unified-field theory of Western culture, high and low, since the Egyptians invented beauty--making a persuasive case for all art as a pagan battleground between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and daemonic nature"--Back cover.

Edmund Wilson's landmark work - the book that helped to establish his reputation as one of this century's foremost literary critics - traces the development of the French Symbolist movement and its influence on six modern writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valery, T.S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein.