IMPRESSIONISM in Literature

The closing moments of the 19th Century saw the emergence of Impressionism in Europe as well as in England. The main effort of the artist in impressionism is in the direction of recreating the experience of the writer and his impressions about reality rather than in presenting reality as it is. Impressionism seeks to suggest the impression on the artist rather than to make an explicit statement about the objective characteristics of things or events. In Rudyard Kipling’s work, there is realism without reality. He was an impressionist and his pictures of realism were marked with an air of romance. He found romance not in the best and the middle ages but in the present realities of life. This attitude was strengthened by Wilfrid Blunt and William Ernest Henley. W.B Yeats was a great exponent of this view in modern drama.