Paul Verlaine with Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Paul Valéry, Albert Samain and many others began to be referred to as "Symbolists." These poets would often share themes that parallel Schopenhauer's aesthetics and notions of will, fatality and unconscious forces, and used themes of sex (such as prostitutes), the city, irrational phenomena (delirium, dreams, narcotics, alcohol), and sometimes a vaguely medieval setting. In poetry, the symbolist procedure—as typified by Verlaine—was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation.
Walter Kennedy (poet) form, register and subject from the "Flyting", his second longest work. There are four other works, all much shorter but still highly various in genre: Walter Kennedy was an acclaimed poet in his lifetime. Both Gavin Douglas and Sir David Lyndsay paid tribute to him as a fellow makar in their works. The twentieth-century poet William Neill, interested in Kennedy's South Ayrshire roots and his possible role as a Gaelic speaker in the Scottish court, has incorporated tributes to the makar into his own writing. One example is the Gaelic poem "Chuma Bhaltair Cinneide" ("In Memory of Walter Kennedy") which