Stephane Mallarme

O rêveuse, pour que je plonge

Au pur délice sans chemin,

Sache, par un subtil mensonge

Garder mon aile dans ta main.

(from 'Eventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé')



Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris into a family in which his father and grandfather had made a noteworthy career in the French civil service. He was expected to follow the family tradition but at school he did not do well except in languages. Mallarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Victor Hugo. At the age of nineteen he found Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, which had appeared in 1857. Under its influence he wrote 'Briese marine,' starting with the much quoted line "Le chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres". After leaving school he visited England and while in London he married Marie Gerhard. Mallarmé taught English from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon, and Paris until his retirement in 1893. His first poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s.



Mallarmé's first important poem, 'L'Azur', was published when he was 24. All his life he spent a very long time on each of his poems, making them as perfect as possible. His best-known work is L'APRÉS-MIDI D'UN FAUNE (1865), which inspired Debussy's tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by the famous painter Manet. The poem presents the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. "Forgetful let me lie where summer's drouth / Sifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth / Dream planet-struck by the grape's round wine-red star. / Nymphs, I shall see the shade that now you are." (trans. by Aldous Huxley) Mallarmé had started to write the poems while working in Tournon, a town he found ugly and unpleasant. For Claude Debussy he wrote in December 1894 after coming from the concert: "... what a marvel! your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun - not in the slightest disaccord with my text, except that it goes further, truly, in nostalgia and light, so delicate, disquieting, and rich."



Between the years 1867 and 1873 Mallarmé did not finish any of his large poetical works, HÉRODIADE (1869) included. Among Mallarmé's later publications are TOAST FUNÈBRE, which was written in memory of the author Théophile Gautier, and the experimental poem, one of his masterpieces, 'Un Coup De Dés' (1914, A Throw of the Dice), which was published posthumously.



From the 1880s Mallarmé was the center of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valéry, and Proust. Mallarmé's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. When Mallarmé started to write poetry in the 1850s', French poets were still rather obedient to certain conventions concerning rhyme, metre, theme, etc. Victor's Hugo's notion that 'pure poetry' is essentially 'useless' was widely accepted. Proust wrote once: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen", and Mallarmé's friend, the painter Edgar Degas, came out from his lecture, and crying "I do not understand, I do not understand." Challenging his readers, Mallarmé sought out from a dictionary the long-forgotten meanings of common words and used these. Naturally this provoked a hostility, that followed Mallarmé through his career. To Proust's attack he answered in The Mystery in Literature: "Every piece of writing, on the outside of its treasure, must-out of respect for those from whom, after all, it borrows the language, for a different purpose-present with the words a meaning, even if an unimportant one: there is an advantage to turning away the idler, who is charmed that nothing here concerns him at first sight."



According to Mallarmé's theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lie the essence of perfect forms. It is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé's poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the point of a poem was the beauty of the language. "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words." Thus a poem should be read as an object independent of the world in which it existed. But sometimes he became bored of the antique gardens of words, where he wanted to live: "The flesh grows weary. And books, I've read them all. / Off, then, to where I glimpse through spray and squall / Strange birds delighting in their unknown skies!" (from 'Seabreeze') Each poem is built around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists of subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. However, he preferred to hint between the lines at meanings rather than state them clearly. "Nommer un object, c'est supprimer les trois-quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est fait peu à peu: le suggérer." The reader must return over and over again to the lines, concentrate on the music of the words rather than the referential meaning. Once he stated: "I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper."



For the rest of his life Mallarmé devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarmé died in Paris on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. Mallarmé's vers libre had a huge influence on twentieth century French poetry, and in the creation of the modernist tradition in German and American poetry.