All language, adjusted to metre, concealing there its vital caesurae, escapes, according to a free disjunction into a thousand simple elements; and, I would point out, not without similarity to the multiple cries of an orchestration, that remains verbal.’13 The disjunctive, multiple verbal complexity of liberated verse has similar patterns and rhythms, Mallarmé argues, to orchestral music. But how might this be? Valéry notices how disjunctive verse behaves like music when he writes:

If the meaning of these lines [of certain Mallarmé sonnets] appeared to me to be very difficult to decipher, if I did not always manage to resolve these words into a complete thought, I nevertheless observed that verse was never more clear as verse, poetry was never more plainly poetry, speech was never more decisively or luminously musical than I found in the poems I was contemplating. Their poetic quality was manifest. And I could not help thinking that even in the greatest poets, if the meaning in most cases leaves no room for doubt, there are lines which are dubious poetry, which we can read with the diction of prose without being forced to raise our voices to the point of song.14

In spite of the poetry’s unresolved questions and elusive nature, there is an overriding impression of its musical rhythms and sonorities. Language assumes some of the non-referential quality of music. Removed from the world of objects associated with ordinary reference, words share music’s signifying patterns. Mallarmé writes: ‘I say: a flower! And, beyond the oblivion to which my voice banishes no contour, as something other than the familiar calyces, arises musically the fragrant idea itself, the absent flower of all bouquets.’15 The word takes on a new and singular existence as a pure ‘musical’ form. Thus poetry is endowed with a new emotive intensity and potential, a quality of feeling no less extraordinary than the novel structures in play.

Like music, the ‘rhythms between the relations’ in poems create reflections, connections, silences, and hermeneutic gaps, revealed and concealed but never totally unveiled, according to language’s own logic. As patterns of meaning appear and disappear in the reading of a Mallarmé poem, they create their own structure or rhythm. The form of meaning is as prominent a part of the poetry as the phonetic and metrical form. Language freed from conventional modes of denotation assumes material existence independent of what it might signify; yet at the same time the word experienced as word creates an immediate consciousness of the absence of identity between word and sign. The word points at once to a thrilling Nothingness, a referential failure, at the heart of language, and to the pure generative power of language itself. This musical poetics inevitably draws close attention to its own practice and to the ultimately arbitrary relationship of language to reality.

Early Career

Mallarmé’s early poetry develops and perfects established post-Romantic themes. ‘Ill Fortune’, for example (1862, largely rewritten in 1887), borrows its title from a Baudelaire poem. It compares two types of poet: ‘heaven’s mendicants’, foregone poets of the Ideal who suckle the breast of sorrow; and ‘a hundred brothers whom none admire, | vile martyrs of contorted chance’. The former group, probably representing Mallarmé’s great Romantic predecessors, is happily sacrificed at the hands of a mighty angel. In one ironic image the crowd kneels before them when they rather too easily and extravagantly ‘versify sensual lamentations’. The latter group, probably representing contemporary poets, is cursed by a grotesque dwarf, a vulgar and tawdry personification of ‘Ill Fortune’. The poem ends with the cursed poets as martyrs: ‘When everyone has spat scorn in their faces, | these mockery-glutted heroes […] grotesquely | hang themselves from a gas lamp in the street.’ The debt to Baudelaire is clear in the contrast between the sacred of the Romantic (genuflections, the mighty angel) and the secular and grotesque of the modern (the accursed grovel in mud and swamp, hounded by ‘this skeleton, dwarf, booted, whose armpit | has worms for hairs’).

The theme of art replacing religion, and the base and mundane replacing God and the Ideal as the poetic focus, forms a significant part of Mallarmé’s ideological inheritance. It can be found in other of his early poems such as ‘The Windows’, ‘The Blue’, and ‘The Flowers’. After a time spent in crisis, depression, and deliberation (1865–7), Mallarmé would push his agnosticism to its most adventurous extreme, an unshakeable faith in literature. But his respect for religion as a marvel of human invention remained, as a letter to his friend the poet Henri Cazalis (1866) suggests: ‘Before the Nothingness which is the Truth, these glorious lies! Such is the outline for my volume of lyric poetry, and such will probably be its title: The Glory of the Lie or The Glorious Lie. I shall sing as a man without hope.’16

In 1863, returned from a stay in London to improve his English, and despite wanting to stay in Paris, Mallarmé was posted to a lycée in Tournon. Over the years spent in the provinces (later Besançon, then Avignon) before his return to Paris in 1871, he juggled writing with an unhappy teaching career. The period was critical for Mallarmé and decisive in terms of his poetic development. On several occasions he reached the depths of despair. The turning-point in his thought came in October 1864, when he started work on his Herodias. ‘As for me,’ he writes famously, ‘I am hard at work. I have at last begun my Herodias. I am terrified because I have to invent a language that will inevitably result from a very new poetics, which I could best describe in these words: “Paint not the thing itself, but the effect that it produces.”’17 Mallarmé saw himself as putting a new poetic theory into practice, replacing a Parnassian focus on objects with Poe’s concern for effect. He probably also wrote the prose poem ‘The Demon of Analogy’ around this time, in which a man is pursued through the streets by a haunting and arbitrary phrase. It deals with a similar idea: that it is necessary to go beyond a traditional referential reading and instead listen to and observe the relations between words in a new way.

The years of ‘crisis’ seem to have led Mallarmé to a renewed and steady belief in literature, an ideal of impersonality for the role he ascribed himself as writer, and a total rejection of God. In 1866 he describes in a letter to the poet Théodore Aubanel, in some markedly Christian metaphors, his process of transformation: ‘As for me, I have worked more this summer than in my entire life. I have laid the foundations of a magnificent work.