Stephane Mallarme Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Stephane Mallarme was born in Paris in 1842, the son of a civil servant in a milieu that afforded him the books, schools, and urban culture that would nurture his vocation. From an early age he gravitated toward poetry, first under the long shadow of the French classics and then, decisively, through reading Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. Baudelaire gave him a model of modern lyric rigor and urbane melancholy; Poe, whom he later translated, offered an ideal of purity, structure, and the dream logic of symbol. By late adolescence Mallarme had already decided that poetry, approached with the seriousness of a metaphysical calling, would determine his life.

Eager for both subsistence and a portal to literature in another tongue, he trained as an English teacher. The choice would define his practical livelihood and his intellectual habits: English granted him a second poetic laboratory, a space to ponder rhythm and nuance beyond French. He learned the classroom arts, obtained certification, and entered the provincial school system, preparing to earn a living while building his inner edifice of art.

Teaching Career and Family
Mallarme spent much of the 1860s as an English teacher in towns far from the Paris literary circles he coveted. The work was steady, the pay modest, and the hours long. In 1863 he married Maria Christina (Marie) Gerhard, a partnership that would accompany every stage of his development. They raised a daughter, Genevieve, and a son, Anatole, whose early death marked the household with sorrow and inspired the haunting, unfinished notes later published as Pour un tombeau d Anatole. Domestic responsibilities and the fatigue of teaching sharpened Mallarme s sense of poetry as an absolute elsewhere, an inner architecture built against contingency.

During these years he worked persistently on Herodiade, a deliberately fragmentary drama-poem, and began Igitur, a visionary prose work he left in manuscript. He published in the Parnasse contemporain, aligning himself initially with the Parnassian emphasis on impersonal craft, even while he pushed beyond it toward a more radical, symbolic poetics. The letters he exchanged with his friend Henri Cazalis from this period record both exhilaration and a metaphysical crisis that grounded his resolve to pursue a poetry seeking the pure idea through a play of language.

Formation of a Poetic Vision
Mallarme s evolving aesthetics coalesced around a few principles that would define Symbolism. Poetry, he argued, must not state but evoke; it should summon the Idea behind appearances by orchestrating silences, ellipses, and correspondences. Words, in his famous ambition, ought to be given a purer sense. Rather than describing the world directly, the poem constructs a space in which phenomena resonate, allowing meaning to emerge obliquely. This vision, anti-rhetorical yet intensely constructed, demanded new syntactic boldness and a heightened attention to sound, spacing, and the white of the page.

Baudelaire served as a founding exemplar; Poe, whom Mallarme translated with scrupulous care, provided a methodology of design and a taste for the abstract architecture of verse. He also admired Theophile Gautier s precision and Theodore de Banville s technique, even as he set himself apart. Increasingly he conceived a total project, sometimes called Le Livre (The Book), an unrealized, quasi-ritual work that would synthesize poetry, reading, and community.

Paris, the Mardis, and the Symbolist Network
After the upheavals of the late 1860s and early 1870s, Mallarme secured posts that allowed him to settle in Paris. His apartment on the rue de Rome became the site of the famed Mardis, Tuesday gatherings where the emerging Symbolist generation tested ideas and presented texts. Among the many writers and artists drawn to his quiet authority were Paul Verlaine, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Villiers de l Isle-Adam, Pierre Louys, Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, and, most fatefully for posterity, Paul Valery, who fashioned himself a disciple. Though Arthur Rimbaud did not belong to the regular circle, his work and his legend were constants in the group s discussions through Verlaine and other admirers.

The Mardis were not a school in any official sense; Mallarme presided gently, reading, listening, and suggesting. But the talk established a vocabulary and an ethos that shaped French letters in the 1880s and 1890s. Verlaine championed him publicly, notably in Les Poetes maudits. Valery later bore witness to the intellectual drama of those evenings and to the example Mallarme set: a life made coherent by the rigor of the poem.

Works and Aesthetics
Mallarme s best-known early masterpiece, L Apres-midi d un faune, appeared in 1876, in an edition adorned with engravings by Edouard Manet, reflecting a friendship between poet and painter and Mallarme s advocacy for the Impressionists. The poem s languor, musicality, and fluid transitions between dream and waking announced a new art of suggestion. Meanwhile he honed a range of sonnets and short lyrics of gnomic intensity, including Brise marine and the crystalline Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd hui.

Igitur, composed in the late 1860s, and the dramatic fragments of Herodiade register his struggle with narrative and the conceptual pressures of metaphysics. In prose, he developed a refined criticism that considered painting, music, and the theater; these meditations, along with his programmatic essay Crise de vers, were later gathered in Divagations (1897). His fascination with modern life took an unexpected turn in 1874 when he produced La Derniere Mode, a witty fashion magazine written entirely by himself under multiple feminine signatures, a bravura demonstration of style, urbanity, and the metamorphoses of voice.

His translations of Poe, including The Raven (Le Corbeau) in 1875, helped to consecrate Poe in France and crystallized Mallarme s own conviction that a poem is a machine of effects. Late in his career he offered Un Coup de des jamais n abolira le hasard (1897), a typographically daring score for the eye and the voice that reorganized the page into fields of force. With its scattered constellations of words and architectonic pauses, it stands as a culminating statement of his belief that silence and spacing are integral elements of poetic composition.

Alliances with Artists and Musicians
Mallarme s dialogues extended beyond the literary sphere. His friendship with Edouard Manet is emblematic: the painter illustrated L Apres-midi d un faune and figured as a touchstone in Mallarme s art criticism, where the poet defended the new painting as an art of suggestion and sensation akin to Symbolist aims. In music, Claude Debussy s Prelude a l apres-midi d un faune (1894) offered a famously felicitous encounter between score and poem. Mallarme welcomed the piece, sensing that its floating harmonies realized in sound the languor and suspension he had sought in verse. In later years composers such as Debussy and Maurice Ravel set his poems, extending his presence into the concert hall.

His literary friendships also fed a network of mutual homage. Verlaine s advocacy broadened his audience; Huysmans, in A rebours, canonized him as a poet for the fin-de-siecle sensibility; Villiers de l Isle-Adam provided a model of visionary intransigence; and Valery, taking Mallarme as a master of intellectual poetics, articulated the legacy for the twentieth century. Through these interlocutors, Mallarme s exacting art entered the bloodstream of European modernism.

Public Persona and Pedagogy
Despite his reputation for difficulty, Mallarme, in person, combined reserve with hospitality. The Mardis functioned as a form of pedagogy: not lectures, but conversations in which he weighed words, pressed for precision, and demonstrated by example how to make a poem resonate. He was a loyal listener, quick to shelter younger writers and to honor the dead, composing tombeaux, or memorial sonnets, for figures he revered, including Baudelaire and, later, Verlaine.

His day job never vanished. He continued to teach English well into his maturity, a fact that moderated his public profile and tethered him to routines even as his fame grew. That duality contributed to his myth: a patient craftsman in the classroom and, at night, a theorist-poet remaking the instrument of language.

Late Years and Death
In the 1890s Mallarme reached an apex of influence. Divagations assembled his critical writings; journal publications allowed Un Coup de des to appear with its experimental layout; and his Tuesday evenings drew a constellation of admirers. He also suffered bouts of ill health. In 1898, at his retreat in Valvins on the Seine, he died suddenly, widely reported as the result of a fatal spasm of the larynx. Friends and disciples accompanied him to burial nearby, marking the end of a life that had transmuted quiet labor into a lasting transformation of the art of poetry.

Legacy
Mallarme s legacy is at once technical and spiritual. He demonstrated that the printed page could be scored like music; that suggestion can surpass description; and that the poem can serve as an exacting instrument for approaching the ideal. His influence runs directly through Paul Valery and other attendees of the Mardis, and more broadly through Symbolism into modernist literature and music. Debussy s sound-world, Ravel s settings, Huysmans s fictional canon, and the critical reflections of Gide and Claudel all bear the Mallarmean imprint.

He remains, above all, the poet who showed how to give a purer sense to the words of the tribe, to make silence speak, and to let the constellation of a few chosen terms suggest a universe. From the provincial classroom to the rue de Rome and the quiet house at Valvins, the people around him formed a fellowship of listening and invention: Manet and Debussy in the arts; Verlaine, Villiers, Huysmans, Gide, Louys, Claudel, and Valery in letters; Poe and Baudelaire as tutelary presences; Marie Gerhard and his children as the intimate ground of his days. Through them, and through the works he left, Mallarme s singular voice continues to summon readers to the demanding clarity of the Idea.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Stephane, under the main topics: Wisdom - Poetry - Book - Reinvention - Sadness.