Mallarmé, Stéphane

Mallarmé, Stéphane (stāfän` mälärmā`), 1842–98, French poet. Mallarmé's great importance is as the chief forebear of the symbolists; many poets and other writers of the mid-1880s drew inspiration at the Tuesday evening gatherings where Mallarmé expounded his theories. He held that the poet should express the ideas of a transcendental world, that poetry should evoke thoughts through suggestion rather than description, and that it should approach the abstraction of music. Mallarmé's language defies traditional syntax and is frequently so obscure that it must be read with commentary. His best-known poems are Hérodiade (1869), L'Après-Midi d'un faune (1876; The Afternoon of a Faun), which inspired a composition by Debussy, and Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897; A Throw of the Dice Will Never Eliminate Chance). Editions of Mallarmé's poetry were published in 1887 and 1899, and a selection of prose, Divagations, in 1897. Mallarmé earned his living by teaching English. The influence of his poetry was particularly felt by Valéry.

Bibliography

See selected letters, ed. and tr. by R. Lloyd (1988); biography by A. France (1967); studies by T. A. Williams (1970), D. H. Morris (1977), M. Bowie (1982), L. W. Marvick (1986), and G. Robb (1996).

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Mallarmé, Stéphane

Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891.

(credit: Archives Photographiques)

(born March 18, 1842, Paris, France—died Sept. 9, 1898, Valvins, near Fontainbleau) French poet. With Paul Verlaine, he was a founder and leader of the Symbolist movement. A schoolteacher throughout his life, Mallarmé made steady progress in his parallel career as a poet. Perhaps partly owing to tragedies in his life, most of his verse expresses an intellectual longing to transcend reality and find refuge in an ideal world, as in the dramatic poems Hérodiade (1869) and L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876; “The Afternoon of a Faun”), which inspired Claude Debussy's famous prelude, and the typographically innovative Un Coup de dés (1897). After 1868 he devoted himself to writing complex, exquisitely wrought, and extraordinarily difficult poems about the nature of imagination itself. The poems were intended for what he called his Grand oeuvre, which he never completed.

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Mallarmé, Stéphane 

Born Mar. 18, 1842, in Paris; died Sept. 9, 1898, in Valvins, department of Seine-et-Marne. French poet.

The son of a civil servant, Mallarmé became a teacher of English in 1863. After first modeling his verse on C. Baudelaire and the Parnassians, Mallarmé became one of the leading poets of French symbolism in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Despite his democratic attitudes, dissatisfaction with bourgeois reality, search for an ideal (poems of the 1860’s-1870’s, such as “Azure,” “Windows,” “The Wind From the Sea”), and readiness to evaluate the multicolored beauty of the world impressionistically (“The Afternoon of a Faun,” 1876, to which music was written by C. Debussy, 1892), Mallarmé arrived at a tragic conception about the split between poetry and life (“The Swan,” 1885). He came to the idea of an extremely hermetic poetry (Prose for des Esseintes, 1885) that would convey the pure idea by means of symbols alone (the article “Mystery in Poetry,” 1896). Bourgeois critics saw Mallarmé only as a symbolist and aesthete. However, Mallarme was also attracted to the real (Occasional Poems, 1880-98; published, 1920) and to comprehensive classical forms of poetry.

The essence of Mallarmé’s poetry is contained in the narrative poem “A Cast of the Die” (1897), a merciless, self-critical summary of the attempts of symbolist poetry to rise above reality; the poem turns to those abstract and metaphorical forms of realistic reflection of the objective world that in the 20th century came to be characteristic of G. Apollinaire, V. Nezval, P. Neruda, and French poetry of the Resistance and subsequent period.

WORKS

Oeuvres complètes. Edited by H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris, 1956. (With bibliography.)
In Russian translation:
[Verse.] In Voloshin, M. Stikhotvoreniia 1900-1910. Moscow, 1910.
[Verse.] In Briusov, V. Poln. sobr. soch. i perevodov, vol. 21. St. Petersburg, 1913.

REFERENCES

Istoriia frantsuzskoi literatury, vol. 3. Moscow, 1959.
Verlaine, P. Les Poètes maudits. Paris, 1884.
Royère, J. Mallarmé. Paris, 1927.
Mondor, H. Vie de Mallarmé. Paris, 1941.
Roulet, C. Eléments de poétique mallarméenne … . Neuchatel [1947].
Dujardin, E. Mallarmé par l’un des siens. Paris, 1952.
Aragon, L. Journal d’une poésie nationale. Lyon, 1954.
Piselli, F. Mallarmé e l’estetica. [Milan, 1969.]

N. I. BALASHOV