In literature, symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. Symbolist writers, in reaction to earlier 19th-century trends (the romanticism of novelists such as Victor Hugo, the realism and naturalism of Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola), proclaimed that the imagination was the true interpreter of reality. They also discarded rigid rules of versification and the stereotyped poetic images of their predecessors, the so-called Parnassians. Important precursors of symbolist poetry were the American writer Edgar Allan Poe and the French poet Gérard de Nerval.

   In the visual arts, symbolism has both a general and a specific meaning. It refers, in one sense, to the use of certain pictorial conventions (pose, gesture, or a repertoire of attributes) to express a latent allegorical meaning in a work of art (see Iconography). In another sense, the term symbolism refers to a movement that began in France in the 1880s, as a reaction both to romanticism and to the realistic approach implicit in impressionism. Not so much a style per se, symbolism in art was an international ideological trend that served as a catalyst in the development away from representation in art and toward abstraction. 
 
   Inspiration was found initially in the work of the French painters Pierre Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and Odilon Redon, who used brilliant colors and exaggerated expressiveness of line to represent emotionally charged dream visions, often verging on the macabre, inspired by literary, religious, or mythological subjects.