Mallarmé, Stéphane
Mallarmé, Stéphane ( 1842 – 98 ),French poet, one of the founders of modern European poetry, and more recently one of the heroes of structuralism . He spent the years 1862 – 3 in London; thereafter he taught English in various lycées, mostly in Paris. The hermetic preciousness of his later verse made him the object of a cult. Two of his longer pieces, the icily poised ‘Hérodiade’ ( c. 1864 ) and the sensuously textured ‘Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune’ ( c. 1865 ), celebrate the hidden virtues of deferment and absence against the vulgarity of possession and plenitude. His pursuit of a perfection realizable only through renunciation of the actual demanded a new effort of language: the rare, intensely wrought lyrics, sonnets, and elegies gathered in Poésies ( 1887 ) and Vers et prose ( 1893 ) attempt a science of suggestion through the exploitation of syntactical and...
[The entire page is 200 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Oxford University Press Titles
