I have tried this, but adding symbols to the file becomes a giant PITA. Then, you also have to ensure that symbols are loaded on every page. I had some SVGs that were multiple kilobytes (logos and stuff), and this just increased the page weight.
You can give my library, svg-loader, [1] a try. It's a single line of javascript that makes it really easy to load external SVGs as inline elements. The syntax is even shorter and you avoid all the problems of external SVGs.