By Cecil Campbell, exhibition and engagement student lead for the Main Library Gallery.

The Symbolist Movement took place in France and Belgium in the late 19th century as a response to styles that emphasized realistic and classical forms. Visitors to the Main Library Gallery’s spring 2025 exhibit, A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive will note the wide variety of abstract and non-traditional art throughout the gallery. This is because the Symbolists believed that deeper meanings could be discovered through art that did not attempt to make sense of the subject through literal portrayal. Symbolism is still used by many artists today.

Though the exhibit focuses on works inspired by French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard,” we can see the influence of notable American poet Edgar Allan Poe in several pieces within the exhibit. The goal of Symbolist art is to use abstract visuals to represent specific concepts—anything from the mourning, uncertainty, or twisting anxiety we see in Poe’s poems to the breaking of barriers and boundaries in Mallarme’s “Un coup de dés.”

Poe’s use of concepts like dreams, abstraction, and psychoanalysis made him very popular among the Symbolist crowd, especially with his focus on darker concepts. Charles Baudelaire was the first person to translate Poe to French, and Stéphane Mallarmé was the first to translate The Raven, specifically. Poe became an influential figure among the Symbolists for the way that he used imagery in his writing to communicate so clearly the themes of his stories. The Raven stands as an excellent example of this. Many of Poe’s stories center on a protagonist who carries on toward some sort of breaking point—a moment at which we realize that something about the story, whether it be the protagonist or the world around them, is no longer what it seems. In The Raven, for example, what drives our protagonist toward his mounting mental breakdown is the presence of the titular raven, who repeats the word “nevermore” over and over. The protagonist interprets meaning into this message—grief and dread, and inescapable loss, though these themes are never communicated directly to us.   

To quote scholar James Lawler on Poe’s Symbolist influence, “For Baudelaire he was ‘one of the greatest of literary heroes,’ for Mallarmé ‘the spiritual Prince of this age,’ for Valéry an ‘achieved mind’: Symbolists that stand at the beginning, middle, and end of a lineage are constant in their fidelity to Poe. They encountered half-secretly, each in turn, a stranger to the canon and found in him the key to their works, for he served Baudelaire against Hugo, Mallarmé against Baudelaire, Valéry against Mallarmé. Distinct from the native conventions, he provoked less violence or anxiety than the intimate ferment of self-recognition.” 

A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive is open through June 27, 2025. Learn more about the exhibit and the Main Library Gallery’s open hours at lib.uiowa.edu/gallery. The Main Library Gallery is free and open to the public.