Mallarmé, Stéphane (stāfän` mälärmā`), 1842–98, French poet. Mallarmé's great importance is as the chief forebear of the symbolists symbolists, in literature, a school originating in France toward the end of the 19th cent. in reaction to the naturalism and realism of the period. Designed to convey impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, symbolism found its first expression in
..... Click the link for more information. ; 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.
(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.
..... Click the link for more information. ; 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).
Mallarmé, Stéphane
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Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891.
(credit: Archives Photographiques)
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