Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé (born March 18, 1842, Paris—died Sept. 9, 1898, Valvins, near Fontainebleau, Fr.) was a French poet, an originator (with Paul Verlaine) and a leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry.

Mallarmé enjoyed the sheltered security of family life for only five brief years, until the early death of his mother in August 1847. This traumatic experience was echoed 10 years later by the death of his younger sister Maria, in August 1857, and by that of his father in 1863. These tragic events would seem to explain much of the longing Mallarmé expressed, from the very beginning of his poetic career, to turn away from the harsh world of reality in search of another world; and the fact that this remained the enduring theme of his poetry may be explained by the comparative harshness with which adult life continued to treat him. After spending the latter part of 1862 and the early months of 1863 in London so as to acquire a knowledge of English, he began a lifelong career as a schoolteacher, first in provincial schools (Tournon, Besançon, and Avignon) and later in Paris. He was not naturally gifted in this profession, however, and found the work decidedly uncongenial. Furthermore, his financial situation was by no means comfortable, particularly after his marriage in 1863 and after the birth of his children, Geneviève (in 1864) and Anatole (in 1871). To try to improve matters he engaged in part-time activities, such as editing a magazine for a few months at the end of 1874, writing a school textbook in 1877, and translating another textbook in 1880. In October 1879, after a six-month illness, his son Anatole died.

Despite these trials and tribulations, Mallarmé made steady progress with his parallel career as a poet. His early poems, which he began contributing to magazines in 1862, were influenced by Charles Baudelaire, whose recently published collection Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) was largely concerned with the theme of escape from reality, a theme by which Mallarmé was already becoming obsessed. But Baudelaire’s escapism had been of an essentially emotional and sensual kind—a vague dream of tropical islands and peaceful landscapes where all would be “luxe, calme et volupté” (“luxury, calm, and voluptuousness”). Mallarmé was of a much more intellectual bent, and his determination to analyze the nature of the ideal world and its relationship with reality is reflected in the two dramatic poems he began to write in 1864 and 1865, respectively, Hérodiade (“Herodias”) and L’Après-midi d’un faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”), the latter being the work that inspired Claude Debussy to compose his celebrated Prélude a quarter of a century later.

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Poetry: First Lines

By 1868 Mallarmé had come to the conclusion that, although nothing lies beyond reality, within this nothingness lie the essences of perfect forms. The poet’s task is to perceive and crystallize these essences. In so doing, the poet becomes more than a mere descriptive versifier, transposing into poetic form an already existent reality; he becomes a veritable God, creating something from nothing, conjuring up for the reader, as Mallarmé himself put it, “l’absente de tous bouquets”—the ideal flower that is absent from all real bouquets. But to crystallize essences in this way, to create the notion of floweriness, rather than to describe an actual flower, demands an extremely subtle and complex use of all the resources of language, and Mallarmé devoted himself during the rest of his life to putting his theories into practice in what he called his Grand Oeuvre (“Great Work”), or Le Livre (“The Book”). He never came near to completing this work, however, and the few preparatory notes that have survived give little or no idea of what the end result might have been.

On the other hand, Mallarmé did complete a number of poems related to his projected Grand Oeuvre, both in their themes and in their extremely evocative use of language. Among these are several elegies—the principal ones being to Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Wagner, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Verlaine—that Mallarmé was commissioned to write at various times in his career. He no doubt agreed to do them because the traditional theme of the elegy—the man is dead but he lives on in his work—is clearly linked to the poet’s own belief that, although beyond reality there is nothing, poetry has the power to transcend this annihilation. In a second group of poems, Mallarmé wrote about poetry itself, reflecting evocatively on his aims and achievements.

In addition to these two categories of poems, he also wrote some poems that run counter to his obsession with the ideal world, though they, too, display that magical use of language of which Mallarmé had made himself such a master. These are the dozen or so sonnets he addressed to his mistress, Méry Laurent, between 1884 and 1890, in which he expressed his supreme satisfaction with reality. At that time, life was becoming much happier for him, not only because his liaison was agreeable but also because a review of him in the series of articles entitled Les Poètes maudits (“The Accursed Poets”) published by Verlaine in 1883 and the praise lavished on him by J.-K. Huysmans in his novel À rebours (“The Wrong Way”) in 1884 led to his wide recognition as the most eminent French poet of the day. A series of celebrated Tuesday evening meetings at his tiny flat in Paris were attended by well-known writers, painters, and musicians of the time. All this perhaps decreased his need to seek refuge in an ideal world, and in Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, poème (“A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish the Hazard, Poem”), the work that appeared in 1897, the year before his death, he found consolation in the thought that he had met with some measure of success in giving poetry a truly creative function.

Mallarmé died in 1898, at his cottage at Valvins, a village on the Seine near Fontainebleau, his main residence after retirement.

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