Animi Figura

Abstract To mitigate the effects of his worsening tuberculosis, Symonds fled to Davos, Switzerland, which soon became his primary home. There he befriended Robert Louis Stevenson, from whom he sought advice on plans to publish a new collection of poems, Animi Figura, which would appear in 1882, supplemented two years later by a privately printed volume, Fragilia Labilia, and a published one, Vagabunduli Libellus. In their frequent conversations, Symonds partly embraced, partly contested the theories of psychic doubleness espoused by Stevenson, who would later base his Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde on Symonds. This chapter considers these poetic collections and Stevenson’s influence on them in order to construct a first picture of Symonds’s own psychological views.