‘A capital fellow, full of vivacity & good talk’: Arthur Symons and Gabriel Sarrazin

International audienceArthur Symons is currently regarded as a cultural mediator of the cosmopolitan fin de siècle. He stands at the crossroads of distinctive journalistic and literary networks, and of translations in different languages. In the mid-1880s Symons, who had just published An Introduction to the Study of Browning, was regarded as a budding critic with a strong interest in French poets and prose writers. Such an interest opened the door of French publications for him through the mediation of the French critic Gabriel Sarrazin (1853-1935), nowadays as neglected as Symons once was. In La Renaissance de la poésie anglaise, 1798-1889: Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman (1890), Sarrazin favourably discussed A Study of Browning and was one of the first French littérateurs to consider Symons as a critic of British modern poetr