But in truth there is no prose: there is the alphabet, and then verses more or less tight, more or less diffuse.’9 It is in the prose pieces, significantly entitled ‘Anecdotes or Poems’, that poetry and the everyday meet and fuse. They can be narrative or lyric, more or less elliptical, short or long. They are richly poetic and syntactically complex explorations of anecdotes ranging from the banal to the bizarre, based on reminiscences, journeys, spectacles, and so on, with a strong flavour of the absurd and the uncanny inherited from Poe and Baudelaire. This daring vision of the shared identity of verse and prose would lead eventually to a spatialized form, the radical experiment of A Dice Throw.

New Rhythms of Verse

Coming out of the ‘Parnassian’ movement, which prized impersonality, craft, and formal perfection over Romanticism’s lyrical inspiration, late nineteenth-century poets sought a new order. From the 1860s onwards artists were engaged with the need to reinvent linguistic, visual, and musical forms of expression. The ‘liberation’ of verse was begun by Victor Hugo, Théodore de Banville, and Baudelaire, who placed great value on the rhythm of dramatic breaks in sense produced by the tension between scansion and accent. Verlaine moved away from the sonnet and frequently exploited the ‘imparisyllabic’ line, achieving a new kind of unhindered weightlessness and indeterminacy. He claimed that achieving such an exquisite, directionless ambivalence in verse is the principal aim of the poet. Through the impair (the line of an uneven number of syllables, in contrast to the traditional alexandrine), which divests verse of its traditional rhythms and patterns of signification, attention can be drawn first and foremost to the language itself. Verlaine was responsible for a change in the prevailing poetic mood. His young followers, Charles Morice, Stuart Merrill, Henri de Régnier, and Francis Vielé-Griffin, would be at the forefront of a further innovation, that of ‘free verse’; but Mallarmé always remained opposed to this complete abandonment of versificatory constraints altogether.

The drive for artistic revolution was born of ennui, a sense that everything had been done, written, and felt. In ‘Sea Breeze’, a poem that retains strong traces of Baudelaire, Mallarmé writes: ‘The flesh is sad | and I’ve read every book.’ In ‘A Season in Hell’ Rimbaud declares: ‘I no longer know how to talk.’ New expressivity was required. In this spirit of invention Mallarmé developed his complex, unsettling palette of poetic textures, combining hesitation, discontinuity, mobility, and stasis. His expansion of the verse category to include any language in varying degrees of tightness or diffuse-ness indicates how important to him as poetic tools are the constraint and release of fluidity, air, and blank space. He delights in the new rhythms that tightening and loosening can bring—from fan-beating in ‘Another Fan’, suspended in the timeless, ecstatic inertia of a kiss that can neither explode into fulfilment nor subside, to the self-organizing and disorganizing asymmetries of ‘A Dice Throw’.

Mallarmé and Music

The move to ‘liberate’ verse and search for new rhythms of meaning was in large part guided by poets who looked to music to provide a model. Mallarmé’s observations about music inform his poetics at the most fundamental level. He lived at a time of heightened mutual awareness between music and literature, and his work represents a particularly fertile moment of crossover in the histories of the two arts. The composer Paul Dukas comments: ‘Verlaine, Mallarmé and Laforgue brought us new tones and sonorities. They projected on to words glimmers that had never before been seen and used procedures undreamt of by their predecessors; […] above all, they conceived of verse or prose as though musicians.’10

The relationship of music and literature had reached fever pitch with Richard Wagner, whose controversial theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total art work’) provoked an uncomfortable, defensive response in Symbolist circles. Wagner’s influence challenged writers to reclaim language as the supremely expressive medium to rival the power of music. René Ghil and Stuart Merrill, for example, known as the Instrumentistes, tried harnessing the colours and emotions of music to specific nuances of language in tables of correspondences between the sounds of the alphabet and tones of orchestral instruments. Verlaine’s calculated rhythmic irregularity was intended to invest poetry with ‘musicality’, as he proclaims in his ‘Art poétique’: ‘Music above everything else! | And to write it favour the Impair | It is more vague and soluble in air.’ Mallarmé greatly admired this brand of musical poetry:

The precision of your hearing, both mental and otherwise, confounds me. You can boast of having made known to our rhythms an extraordinary destiny; and putting aside that you are an astonishingly sensitive man, it will never be possible to speak of Verse without coming from it to Verlaine. In the end, in fact, nothing resembles a caprice less than your nimble and sure guitarist’s art: that exists; and imposes itself as the new poetic discovery.11

Much of the momentum for the crossover between the arts came from gatherings held by Mallarmé in his small flat on Tuesday evenings. These became known as the mardis (‘Tuesdays’); here Mallarmé would hold forth on his aesthetics, projects, and poetic heroes. In the early 1880s when the mardis began just a few of Mallarmé’s friends were present, among them Verlaine, Ghil, and Merrill. By the height of Mallarmé’s fame in the 1890s the crowd had swollen to include just about every major figure from the literary and artistic world of Paris and beyond, not least Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Valéry, and Claude Debussy. Debussy’s tone poem Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune was later made into a ballet. Between Mallarmé and Debussy’s work there is a very rich area of aesthetic and structural overlap, which goes beyond the coincidence of their sharing a period style.)

Mallarmé stands out from his contemporaries as an extraordinary listener and for the extent to which he achieves his brilliantly conceived musico-poetic aesthetic in practice. In his seminal lecture ‘Music and Letters’, given in Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, he claims that music and literature are two sides of the same coin: ‘Music and Letters are the alternate face here broadened towards the obscure.’12 His vision is that music and letters should have a shared structural rhythm in the artwork. But it is not merely the surface phonetic sonority of the poem that he considers musical; it is also what he calls the ‘rhythms between the relations’ (set up between certain configurations of language in verse), which reflect the Idea and enact a silent, structural music. ‘It is the same as an orchestra’, he writes, ‘only literary and silent.’

He describes the new energies produced from the fragmentation of language in (his) verse and draws a parallel with the sounds and structures he hears in music: ‘Verse, I believe, was waiting out of respect until the giant who stamped it with his blacksmith’s hand steady and ever firmer had passed on, so that it could fracture.