The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first, I study Valencia's life and education, his primary contact with universal literary traditions, and the adoption of Symbolism, which eventually shapes his multicultural interests and linguistic mastery. In the second chapter, I analyze and compare the works of Valencia with some of the most representative poems by the French poets Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine and Rimbaud. Valencia's translations of famous works of these French poets becomes the starting point to discuss his own Symbolist style. In addition, in the second chapter, I review the resonance and adaptability of French Symbolism into the Modernista movement in Latin America. In the third chapter I delve into some of the most important leit motifs of the Symbolist period that became part of Valencia's representative poems, primarily those of Ritos, which function as a paradigm of his poetic world. These motifs are: the living anguish of the poet, his destiny as an artist, his portrait of twilight and the mutability of life, and finally, Valencia's perception of the enigmatic nature of the Modernista woman. The fourth chapter serves as a confirmation of the originality of Valencia, not only of his personalized Symbolist style in Ritos, but also of his versatility as a creative translator in the Orientalist collection, Catay, which, despite differences in contexts and periods, confirms the aesthetic unity of Valencia's poetic work. The Symbolist imagery projected in Catay becomes more subtle and naive than that of Ritos and Otras poesias, but all the collections express different manifestations of the poet's consistent aesthetic. Finally, in the last chapter, I analyze a representative sample from all the poet's collections in order to justify the harmony between the suggestive imagery of the content and the architecture of the form. In the conclusion I suggest that Valencia's poetry as a whole merits further explanation of its Symbolist nature, and this dissertation provides a new framework to elucidate a syncretic and original aesthetic within the context of a wider formulation of Modernismo.

In order to examine the Colombian poet Guillermo Valencia within the context of the literary tendencies of the closing years of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, it is necessary to compare his aesthetic and that of the most important motifs of French Symbolism. In this study the consistent development of the Symbolist aesthetic throughout the different collections of the poet provides the structure for an examination of his poetic work. However, Valencia's creativity, because of its universality, goes beyond the contextual imagery of French Symbolism, and his personal style projects inner moods upon natural and historical landscapes by merging classical and modern poetic traditions with his own life and geographical context. Hence, Valencia's original production is unique to the Colombian literary world and participates in the versatility of the Modernista period.