He poses the questions that have become central to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary criticism. Though an apparent aesthete, he even became for Jean-Paul Sartre a model of the ‘committed’ writer, admirable for the way he defamiliarized language.

But probably the best-known feature of Mallarmé’s verse is its exceptional difficulty. Today’s reader might feel sympathy with Paul Valéry’s description in 1933 of his earliest encounter with some of the poems:

There were certain sonnets that reduced me to a state of stupor; poems in which I could find a combination of clarity, brightness, movement, the fullest sound, but strange difficulties as well: associations that were impossible to solve, a syntax that was sometimes strange, thought itself arrested at each stanza; in a word, the most surprising contrast was evident between what one might call the appearance of these lines, their physical presence, and the resistance they offered to immediate understanding. […] I was confronting the problem of Mallarmé.1

The ‘problem’ that Valéry describes stems from Mallarmé’s extraordinary reinvention of poetic expression. The reader has to grapple with great metaphysical questions, existential doubt, strangeness, and uncertainty; with rhythms of fragmentation and silence; dislocated syntax; the rapid formation, transmutation, and evaporation of images; and thoughts that seem to escape being fixed into any one interpretation. Valéry is outlining one of the fundamental tensions that mark out Mallarméan verse: the pull between the structural function of a poem’s form, rhymes, and rich phonetic patterning, which can overwhelmingly suggest that there is or ought to be an order of sense, a semantic completion produced from the poem’s whole; and the concurrent, conflicting story of fragmentation and discontinuity, of syntactical and textual interruption, and affronts to semantic coherence.

Not all of Mallarmé’s contemporary critics felt as generous about the ‘problem’ of his verse as Valéry. Paul Verlaine’s 1883 study of Mallarmé in his article ‘Damned Poets’ reveals that many of Mallarmé’s reviewers considered him a madman: ‘In Parnassus he furnished verse of a novelty that caused a scandal in the newpapers. […] In the civilized pages, in “the bosom” of the serious Reviews, everywhere or nearly so, it became fashionable to laugh, to recall to the tongue the accomplished writer, to the feelings of the beautiful the sure artist. Among the most influential, fools treated the man as a madman!’2 Others accused him of deliberately mystifying credulous readers, his verse merely a display of linguistic preciosity that concealed triviality. In 1896 Marcel Proust attacked Symbolist poets, above all Mallarmé: ‘The poet renounces that irresistible power of waking so many Sleeping Beauties dormant in us, if he speaks a language that we do not know.’3

Mallarmé replied later that year in the essay ‘The Mystery in Letters’: ‘My preferred response to aggression is to retort that some contemporaries do not know how to read—except newspapers, that is.’4 For him, and indeed for many of his Symbolist peers, the vital role of poetry was to purge language of its everyday setting. He expresses contempt for base, ordinary language, such as that used in journalism, which offers no resistance to understanding and forgoes its proper magic by referring simply to fact. He consciously distinguishes two effects of expression, transmitting a fact and evoking an emotion, and sees a clear divide between the latter and ease of comprehension. Verse should conjure up an atmosphere of strangeness, its function to express ‘the mysterious sense of the aspects of existence’. This attachment to the oblique, suggestive utterance owes a clear debt to Gérard de Nerval’s doubt in the possibility of a coherent poetic voice and to Charles Baudelaire’s aesthetic of ‘evocative sorcery’. Mallarmé depicts the poet as high priest, necessarily set apart from the mundane political process in order to learn and reveal the mysterious truth. In a letter to Edmund Gosse (1893) he writes: ‘Only the Poets have the right to speak.’5 It is as such an isolated figure that J.-K. Huysmans paints Mallarmé in the novel Against Nature (1884), where the protagonist des Esseintes reads and admires his work:

He loved these lines, as he loved all the works of this poet who, in an age of universal suffrage and a period when money reigned supreme, lived apart from the world of letters, protected by his contempt from the stupidity surrounding him, taking pleasure, far from society, in the revelations of the intellect, in the fantasies of his brain, further refining already specious ideas, grafting on to them thoughts of exaggerated subtlety, perpetuating them in deductions barely hinted at and tenuously linked by an imperceptible thread […] The result was a literary distillate, a concentrated essence, a sublimate of art.6

This depiction as one of the period’s strange new decadent writers would push Mallarmé into the literary limelight. Its linkage between retreat from the world and linguistic distillation is corroborated by a line from ‘The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe’: ‘Bestow purer sense on the phrases of the crowd.’ But in spite of his distance from society, the modern artist’s search to reveal ‘truth’ was in Mallarmé’s eyes not apolitical but, rather, radical and democratic. In an article extolling the modernity of his great friend Édouard Manet’s painting, he writes: ‘At this critical hour for the human race when Nature desires to work for herself, she requires certain lovers of hers—new and impersonal men placed directly in communion with the sentiment of their time—to loose the restraint of education, to let hand and eye do what they will, and thus through them, reveal herself.’7 As with painting, the poet’s task is to free linguistic units from their contingent relations through suggestion and to transpose them into a network of reciprocal relations—the ‘essence’ that reflects and reveals the ‘Idea’. Mallarmé endows this process with secular religiosity, calling it a ‘divine transposition, for the accomplishment of which man exists, [which] goes from the fact to the ideal’.8

Mallarmé’s mixture of Plato, Hegel, and a post-Romantic yearning for the mystical beyond cannot really be called a philosophy; but the concept of the Idea has a recurrent and strong structural function in his verse. In particular it gives legitimacy to the declared aim of truth-seeking, supporting the concept of the impersonal poet by rejecting the primacy of the personal in Romantic poetry. It also provides a framework for the central theme of Nothingness: non-meaning is not an absence of meaning but a potentiality of meaning that no specific meaning can exhaust. The shadow of the Idea drives Mallarmé constantly to test the limits and stability of knowledge.

Mallarmé and Prose

Mallarmé was not an unworldly poet. Alongside his relatively small output of verse he wrote much prose, including regular bulletins on the Paris literary and artistic scene for The Athenaeum, and theatrical reviews which he later called ‘critical poems’ and are assembled under the heading ‘Theatre jottings’ in his volume of collected prose, Divagations (Diversions). He translated into French Poe’s The Raven, with Manet providing illustrations, and received several commissions, such as for an English-language textbook, Les Mots anglais (English Words), and a free adaptation of Cox’s mythology, Les Dieux antiques (The Ancient Gods). Perhaps his most intriguing enterprise was the launch of a new magazine, La Dernière Mode (The Latest Fashion). Each number contained a fashion article signed ‘Marguerite de Ponty’, cooking tips, and a review of cultural events in Paris, all written by Mallarmé himself posing under various pseudonyms. This witty and ironic wordsmith of the everyday is a far cry from the reputedly obscure, sterile, and precious poet.

The short poems collected under the title ‘Occasional Verses’, presented in this volume in Appendix 2, and sometimes overshadowed by the canonical poems, are gifts to mark a circumstance. They are displays of poetic dexterity, deftly interweaving proper names and allusion to their subjects’ characteristics or situation in neat little rhyming kernels. Here we see a playful Mallarmé forging new linguistic relationships in order to establish connections between himself and others: he is a writer of rhymed addresses on letters to friends, a giver of fans and boxes of glacé fruit inscribed with verse. In a variation of ‘divine transposition’, occasions and objects become poetic acts, the quotidian becomes textual performance.

Mallarmé’s range of verse form bears witness to this desire to build a bridge between the everyday and the absolute. He covers the spectrum: Petrarchan sonnets (two quatrains followed by two tercets), Shakespearean sonnets (three quatrains and one couplet; see for example ‘The hair flight of a flame …’), alexandrines (the standard French twelve-syllable line), octosyllables and heptasyllables. Then there are the prose pieces and journal articles. Following the move, most prominent in Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, towards making the distinction between poetry and prose more fluid, Mallarmé wants to abolish the distinction altogether: ‘Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses […] of all rhythms.