MallarmePoet

A detailed Summary of MallarmePoet

Stephane Mallarme, a French poet, became one of the most important masters of French symbolism, a nineteenth-century movement in poetry that stressed impressions and moods rather than descriptions of reality (Online). The poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, and others strongly affected Mallarme's writing (Online). He used symbolism to represent human emotions to make his poems unclear, thus avoiding direct communication with his readers (Online & World Book 110,111).

Mallarme was born in Paris on March 18, 1842 (Online). After his mother died when he was seven years old, his grandmother became his parental role model. His education included upper-class boarding schools where he often felt out of place because of his middle class background. When he was fifteen, the death of his younger sister, Maria, greatly influenced his poetic development. He turned from Romantic lyricism to much more morbid subjects like Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal. In 1860, he received his baccalaureate degree from a "lycee" in Sens. After an apprenticeship in the Registry's office, in 1862 he had his first sonnet published in Le papillon, a literary journal. In 1862 Mallarme married Maria Gerhard

The difficult duties of teaching often interrupted his poetic work and thoughts. Although his students made fun of him, Mallarme was not discouraged and continued his writing. After translating Edgar Allan Poe's English poems into French, Mallarme's chief influence became Poe rather than Baudelaire. He began to compose long imaginative poems and a prose poem called Herodiade, the biblical story of Salome who caused John the Baptist's murder. Then he wrote his best-known poem L'Apres-midi d'un faune (Afternoon of a Faun), which explores the difference between reality and fantasy (World Book 110,111).

"Mallarme, Stephane." The World Book Encyclopedia. Volume 13, pp. 110-111.

Chiari, Joseph. Symbolism from Poe to Mallarme. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1956, p.143.

This lyric poem is a sonnet consisting of four stanzas (4,4,4,2) and fourteen lines. Written in meter verse with seven syllables per line, the rhyme scheme is "rime Croisee" (abab, cdcd, efef, gg). Mallarme's concrete words include "ronds de fumee, cigare, la cendre, et de feu" while his positive connotative words consist of "l'ame et le chœur des romances." Mallarme writes "Toute l'ame resumee..." concisely using suggestive, rather than clear images.

In 1869, Mallarme started but did not complete Igitur: ou, la folie d'Elbehnon, twelve prose fragments of different lengths (Online). Classified as a story, a prose poem, and a drama, Igitur did not appeal to feelings but to the intelligence of the reader. It shows his lifelong preoccupation with death, infinity, fantasy, and absence. Despite Mallarme's requests to dispose of his Igitur notes at his death, his son-in-law, Dr. Bonninot, tried to reorganize the prose fragments and published them in 1925. In his final work Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance), Mallarme showed his interest in musical verse form and set his words in different typefaces to illustrate visually the subject of the poem and to stress the unity of thought and sound.

Mallarme thought that one should not

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Approximate Word count = 1404
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Foreign