Vielé-Griffin was educated in France and divided his time between Paris and Touraine. He was a writer of vers libre and founded the highly influential journal Entretiens politiques et littéraires (1890–92). His name will remain attached to the history of symbolism and vers-librism.
Symbolism was a late
nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry
and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through
language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and
realism.
In literature, the style originates
with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works
of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into
French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and
images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine
during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a
series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term
"symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented
the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature
and of art.
Distinct from, but related to, the
style of literature, symbolism in art is related to the gothic component of
Romanticism and Impressionism.
His first collection, Cueille d'avril, appeared in 1885. He
practiced a relaxed prosody, which did not take into account the obligatory
alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, the prohibition to rhyme a plural
with a singular, replaces the rhyme with an assonance.