A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
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Viewing chapter Symbolists (26 quotes)
[In his last essay, Mallarmé] is probing the aesthetic consequences and possibilities of the popular arts of industrial man.
"Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press", in The Sewanee Review, Vol.62, No.1, Jan-March (1954), p 48, reprinted in The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, (1969), p 15
Year: 1954
Then with Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Laforgue, the interior landscape had been used to control the audience emotions directly as later in advertising.
Explorations 8, October (1957), unnumbered page “section 16”, the full Issue later reprinted as Verbi-Voco-Visual, (1967), both versions published unpaginated.
Year: 1957
The Symbolists transferred the entire artistic enterprise from expression to exploration.
Letter to Mark Krupnik, July 7, 1965
Year: 1965
Symbolism consists in pulling out connections.
“Roles, Masks and Performanaces” (1971), pp 520-521
Year: 1971
A newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.
Culture Is Our Business, (1970), p 192
Year: 1970
Chapters:
Goodbye Linearity | Poetry
Mallarmé wrote his most difficult poem Un Coup de Des in newspaper format. He saw like Joyce that the basic forms of communication whether speech, writing, print, press, telegraph and photography, necessarily were fashioned in close accord with man’s cognitive activity.
“Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, 1954, p 56, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 161.
Year: 1954
In their artistic play, they discovered what is actually happening, and thus they appear to be "ahead of their time. "Non-artists always look at the present through the spectacles of the preceding age.”
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 243
Year: 1964
Drawn to McLuhan #4
The external landscape techniques of the Romantic poets and painters were pushed to the extreme point where they suddenly become internal and musical with Rimbaud and the symbolists.
Counterblast (1969), p 83
Year: 1969
As an example, the popular detective story depends on a technique of analysis and reconstruction which depends on the discontinuity of newspaper reportage. This discontinuity in turn is related to the technique of cinematic montage and also to the most successful contemporary methods of scientific analysis and to advanced technique in historiography, archaeology, and anthropology.
“Advertising as a Magical Institution” from The Commerce Journal, Toronto, (1952), reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 21
Year: 1952
Chapters:
Effect | From Tribal to Literate | Hardware / Software | Living Unity | Time | Today’s Transition
…a-historical literary study “in depth” suggests the new power of the inner landscape of the symbolists. They had paralleled the discoveries of Claude Bernard in internal medicine – le milieu interiere. No matter how the specialist of language or science strives to isolate his studies, he will find them resonating with the patterns and intensities of fields remote from his own. And is not the ground of existence of the common and shared measure of the language itself a main reason for this shared consciousness?
“Roles, Masks and Performances” (1971), p 520
Year: 1971
Chapters:
Dropout | Living Unity
Symbolism is a kind of witty jazz, a consummation of Ruskin’s aspirations for the grotesque that would have shocked him a good deal. But it proved to be the only way out of “single vision and Newton’s sleep.”
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 267
Year: 1962
Chapter:
Rhetoric
When the Symbolists began to deal with words as things, they bypassed the print process and accepted words as pigment, as textures, as structures with auras of many kinds. All of these strategies were necessary in order to encounter words at all in the topographic environment.
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 178
Year: 1970
There is no accident about this. Symbolist poetry and painting were magical in theory and in practice, linking objects which had no logical connection.
“The Age of Advertising”, Commonweal, 1953, p 555
Year: 1953
Page 555
[In Baudelaire’s “Hypocrite lecteur”] The sudden reversal whereby the audience becomes the speaker and the speaker assumes the collective mask of the image he presents, was a revolution that involved all subsequent writing. Stephen Daedelus is not Joyce, nor an artist, but the audience of the time in its corporate imaging of art and the artists.
“The Lewis Vortex” (1971) p 5
Year: 1971
…it has taken me a long time to take for granted as a universal and irremediable human condition. Pound never reached that point. W. Lewis: “I write from the standpoint of genius.” E.P. [Ezra Pound]: “I write for those who are top flight inventors and creators in the arts.” T.S. Eliot: “I croon for those who are living and partly living a song of their remote but better selves.: Therefore Lewis and Pound are ignored and Eliot is widely misunderstood. But widely. Old Possum (Eliot) was the shrewder man. And I dislike him for his virtues.
Letter to Felix Giovanelli, September 5, 1948, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 203
Year: 1948
The discontinuous juxtaposition of unrelated items made necessary by the influx of news stories from every quarter of the world, created, [Mallarmé saw, a symbolic landscape of great power and importance... He saw at once that the modern press was not a rational form but a magical one.
Letter to H.A. Innis, March 14, 1951, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987) p 224 [confirm page]
Year: 1951
Poets and artists literally turned their own psyches into laboratories where they practiced the most austere experiments in total disregard of their personal happiness. Gradually it dawned on Mallarmé that pure poetry was possible -- a poetry which would have as its theme the poetic process itself Henceforth the subject and framework of a poem would be the retracing of the moment of perception.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 56, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 160.
Year: 1954
My own interest in symbolist techniques in poetry and painting, and my concern with the poetic processes and the training of perception and awareness, have long taught me to avoid fixed fixed positions and value judgements where techne is concerned.
“Obiter dicta” [“Said in passing”], Letter to Atlantic Monthly Magazine, published in the issue of October, 1971, p.39
Year: 1971
The Symbolists long ago, and Yeats, Joyce, Pound, Eliot in this century, spent their entire lives expounding the aesthetics of the resonant intervals of acoustic space.
Letter to Barbara Ward, February 9,1973, in Letters, 1987, p 466
Year: 1973
The strong local flavour combined with unconscious universality is what Eliot perceived as the significance of St. Louis in his own life and work. In giving him access to a world in which jazz and blues were formed. Eliot saw his own role as the up-dater of the English language in our time.
Letter to Ronni Fiedler, December 19, 1973), in Letters, 1987, p 485
Year: 1973
… a century ago Poe and Baudelaire had fully recognized that communication is not transmission but feedback, not message but participation in the making process.
“Guaranteed Income in the Electric Age”, (1968) p 76
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Communication
[T]he symbolist poet makes of the poem not a vehicle for views, ideas, feelings, but a situation which involves the reader directly in the poetic process. That is why he will always say that the poem is not about anything, it is something. It doesn't say anything, it does something.
Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters” The McAuley Lectures: Christian Humanism in Letters, Saint Joseph College, West Hartford Connecticut, (1954), p 52, reprinted in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 157.
Year: 1954
[At age 19, commenting on a favorite professor]
[The source of Professor Fieldhouses’s popularity]… is in his relating the past to the present, making the past alive and the present historical, by taking in many outside topics and relating them to the subject… If I ever am Engl lecturer I vow I shall be no mediocre one.
1931 Diary, entry of 7 April
1931 Diary, entry of 7 April
Year: 1931
"Cubist perspective"... renders, at once, a diversity of views with the spectator always in the center of the picture.
“Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry”, 1951, republished in The Interior Landscape (1969)
Year: 1951
…it could be said that the entire symbolist awareness of the past century has been our awakening to the nature of the physical bond that is the space between situations.
“Roles, Masks and Performances”, 1971, p 519
Year: 1971
"Interface" refers to the interaction of substances in a kind of mutual irritation. In art and poetry this is precisely the technique of "symbolism" (Greek "symballein" -- to throw together) with its paratectic procedure of juxtaposing without connectives. It is the natural form of conversation or dialogue rather than of written discourse.
Preface to Harold Innis’s Bias of Communication, 1964, p viii
Year: 1964