Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18 March 1842 into an affluent middle-class family. His childhood was marred by the death of his mother when he was only five years old, and he would also lose his sister at the age of fifteen. Mallarmé’s father quickly remarried after the death of his first wife, and devoted his attentions primarily to his new family. As a result, the young Stéphane was frequently shunted between his maternal grandparents, the home of his father and stepmother, and various boarding schools. His school career was far from distinguished: he was seen as a waster by his teachers and was expelled from one school before failing his baccalaureate in 1860. Having retaken and passed the exam later that year, Mallarmé was expected to follow his father and grandfather into a stable career as a civil servant within the records office; but during a year-long apprenticeship, he showed neither interest nor aptitude for the profession. His avid reading of the Romantics, and then poets such as Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire, had fostered his literary ambitions, and – primarily because he believed that this would allow him to pursue these ambitions – he decided to become a teacher of English, one of the few subjects in which he had done well at school. With the reluctant consent of his family, then, he set off for London, where he was to attempt to improve his command of the English language. The trip in fact contained a second, concealed, act of rebellion, for he was accompanied by Maria Gerhard, a German governess he had met in his home town of Sens, and whom he secretly married in London. They would have two children together – Geneviève and Anatole, born in 1864 and 1871 respectively.
Mallarmé obtained his teaching qualification in 1863, and was appointed to Tournon, in the Ardèche, and then to posts in Besançon and Avignon. This was an unhappy and frustrating time for the poet, who found that he hated teaching, and who felt cut off from his friends and exiled from the Parisian literary scene of which he had only had a very fleeting taste. It was also a period in which he underwent a twofold crisis – metaphysical and linguistic – that would have a profound impact on his conception of the nature and role of poetry.
Jean-Paul Sartre famously commented that Mallarmé experienced the death of God more profoundly than Nietzsche (Sartre, 167); but this is not to say that during the 1860s Mallarmé lost any deep-founded faith, for he had never been particularly inclined towards religious belief. Rather, he arrived at an awareness of the full implications of his lack of faith: anticipating existentialism, he realized that without God to guarantee its meaning, human existence was essentially empty and absurd. The hasard, or contingency, that he attributed to existence was also characteristic of language: Mallarmé became increasingly aware of the arbitrary and unstable relationship between words and their referents. The poet could create meaning, Mallarmé realized, but since there was no close or guaranteed correspondence between sound and sense, this meaning would have to reside in sound alone. Meanings would be generated by “un mirage interne des mots mêmes” [an internal mirage of words themselves] – in patterns that would form within the self-contained structure of the poem itself, as Mallarmé explained in a letter of 18 July 1868 (Correspondance complète, 392). These ideas were explored in the “Sonnet en –x”, a first version of which was composed in 1868 as “Sonnet allégorique de lui-même” [Sonnet allegorizing itself], a title that reflects Mallarmé’s intensified concern with language – and with language itself as the principal subject of his poetry. In this poem, an object – the “ptyx”, a word Mallarmé chose precisely because it referred to nothing – is mentioned only to have its existence denied. It is an “aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore”: an empty, reference-less sound. It is nevertheless present as a sound, and meaningful as part of a dense and complex network of rhymes and internal rhymes. As is the case with many of Mallarmé’s later poems, in which motifs often hover between presence and absence, the reader of the “Sonnet en –x”; is left uncertain about the exact nature, and even the existence, of the objects evoked; but as we have seen, following the crisis of the 1860s, reference can no longer be the principal currency of Mallarmé’s poetry. Meaning as reference is questioned, but meaning as beauty – as sonorous, musical effects – remains.
Mallarmé’s period of provincial exile ended with his return to Paris in 1871, in the aftermath of the siege of Paris and the Commune, and he quickly immersed himself in the literary scene, all the while reluctantly continuing to teach. The modest flat that the Mallarmé family rented in the Batignolles area of the city, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, became, in the 1880s, the scene for his famous “mardis”, the Tuesday evening gatherings attended by the cream of the Parisian literary and artistic avant-garde (the long and illustrious list of his friends and acquaintances included the writers &Émile Zola, Gustave Kahn, Oscar Wilde, Henri de Régnier and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; the painters Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas; and the composer Claude Debussy). Mallarmé’s close contact with visual artists was particularly important throughout his life, developing into a series of collaborative projects, including two publications illustrated by Manet (a translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven (1875), and L’Après-midi d’un faune (1876)), various art-critical writings, and a translation of Whistler’s Ten O’Clock Lecture (1888).
Although he was well-known to a select few within the close-knit artistic circles of Paris in the 1870s, Mallarmé remained largely unknown to the wider public until the mid-1880s, when he attained a degree of notoriety, if not fame, thanks to Paul Verlaine’s study of his poetry published as part of the series Les Poètes maudits (1883), and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel A Rebours (1884) which features a laudatory analysis of his poetry (the favourite reading-matter of Huysmans’ effete aesthete hero, des Esseintes). Henceforth Mallarmé was widely recognized as the leader of the Symbolist generation of poets that emerged in the 1880s, although his relationship to that aesthetic movement is somewhat ambiguous. His poetry does epitomize Symbolist aesthetics in certain respects, notably in its rarefied, often hermetic expression, and its apparent estrangement from everyday language and existence; indeed, just as Huysmans’s protagonist des Esseintes had taken refuge from modern life within a series of artificial interiors, Mallarmé’s poems tend to suggest self-contained spaces, closed off to the mundane and brutal modern world (although recent criticism, such as Damian Catani’s The Poet in Society, has countered this view). Furthermore, Mallarmé’s connection with the Symbolist movement was cemented by his frequent contributions to Symbolist reviews such as La Revue indépendante and La Revue blanche, and his role as mentor to the younger generation of poets who were experimenting with free verse. On the other hand, Mallarmé’s literary innovations far outstrip those of any of his contemporaries. The radical visual experimentation of Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897), for example, was one of the first poetic works in which the visual aspect of the poem, as well as its sound, was allowed to become instrumental in the generation of meanings; as such, it inaugurated a new poetic genre that was later to be explored by poets such as Apollinaire, in his Calligrammes. But his most ambitious project was certainly the Grand Œuvre, the poetic masterpiece of which Mallarmé knew he could only ever complete a small preliminary fragment, such would be its scale and importance. The notes for the project, published by Jacques Scherer in 1957, reveal that the work would have incorporated theatrical and ritual elements, thus taking over the role of obsolete religion in attempting “l’explication orphique de la Terre” [the Orphic explanation of the earth], as Mallarmé explained to Paul Verlaine in his autobiographical letter of November 1885 (Correspondance complète, 586).
Alongside the letter to Verlaine, Mallarmé’s most important statement of his poetic ambitions is perhaps his Crise de vers (1896), a montage of earlier texts which, while ostensibly a statement on the free-verse practice of his contemporaries, provides the modern reader with an insight into Mallarmé’s own poetic principles. The first of these principles is impersonality: according to Mallarmé, “L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots” [the pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who lets words take the initiative] (Œuvres complètes II, 211). This point goes some way to explaining the lack of any pronounced authorial voice in Mallarmé’s poetry, since meaning is located in the words themselves – in their pure sound – rather than being dependent on the communicative intentions of the poet. In this, Mallarmé explains, poetic language differs from everyday language, in which words are used to exchange information. Everyday language is like a coin being passed from hand to hand: the value of the coin is not inherent in it, but is determined by the use to which it is put within an agreed system of exchange. Everyday language has no value in itself; but poetic language, in contrast, is valuable in and of itself. It does not serve to convey information about the material world but rather to transcend that world, moving, as Mallarmé tells us in the culminating passages of Crise de vers (Œuvres complètes II, 213) from “un fait de nature” [a fact of nature] towards “la notion pure” [the pure idea]. Mallarmé’s poetry does not evoke the concrete or the particular, and only allows us to glimpse the faintest contours of the motifs he evokes: the lace of “Une dentelle s’abolit”, the shipwrecks of Un Coup de dés and “A la nue accablante tu”, and the nymphs of L’Après-midi d’un faune are all so many objects transposed onto the plane of the ideal as their material reality is questioned.
Since for Mallarmé the purpose of poetry is not to communicate information, it need not be transparent. In an interview in 1891, Mallarmé defended the opacity of his poetic language in the following terms:
Les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entièrement et la montrent: par là ils manquent de mystère; ils retirent aux esprits cette joie délicieuse de croire qu’ils créent. Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poëme qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve. (Œuvres complètes II, 700)
[As for the Parnassians, they take things and show them in their entirety: as such, they lack mystery, denying the mind the sublime joy of creating. To name an object is to take away three quarters of the pleasure of a poem, which is to discover, bit by bit: to suggest, that’s the ideal.]
Unlike the Parnassian group of poets, whose descriptions offer objects up to the reader’s understanding all too easily, Mallarmé only gestures towards meanings, making us discover them gradually. In reading his poetry one does not instantly recognize the principal motifs; indeed, for the reader of Mallarmé the pleasure is to be found in grappling with his language, engaging in a difficult, even tortuous, process of reading and re-reading. The principal difficulty is syntactic: Mallarmé frequently leads us down a syntactic garden path, making us believe that his words are arranged in one syntactic structure only to have that structure crumble, to be replaced by other possible interpretations as we read on through the poem. But as the above passage suggests, this syntactic difficulty is compounded by Mallarmé’s constant refusal to name, and his techniques of ellipsis and allusion.
Mallarmé did enjoy a limited recognition during his lifetime: in the 1890s he was elected “Prince des poètes” by his Parisian contemporaries, and was invited to give lectures on poetry at Oxford and Cambridge. However, the majority of critics responded to his work with accusations of willful obscurity: Tolstoy, in What is Art?, bemoaned the “incomprehensibility” of the sonnet “A la nue accablante tu”, and commented disparagingly, “I have read several other poems by Mallarmé and they also had no meaning whatever. […] It is impossible to understand any of it. And that is evidently what the author intended” (Tolstoy, 103-4). Mallarmé’s response to such criticism was to emphasize, as he did in the 1891 interview, the importance of mystery in literature, and to rail against the crudeness of the kind of literary discourse which puts meanings on display like commodities in a shop window, all the while claiming that his critics evidently did not know how to read (Œuvres completes II, 234).
The notion of “obscurity” has been replaced in more recent critical responses by that of “difficulty”, in the wake of Malcolm Bowie’s important study Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult. Bowie argues that it is a fundamental error to think of Mallarmé’s poetry as containing meanings or messages which are deliberately made inaccessible to the reader, and that difficulty, ambiguity and uncertainty are themselves constitutive of Mallarmé’s meanings, and of the very special experience that reading his poetry provides. There has also been a tendency in recent criticism to counter Mallarmé’s image as a hermit inhabiting a poetic ivory tower, and to emphasize his poetry’s roots in material reality, his engagement with social and political issues, and the less serious, even ludic side of his writing. In addition, critics have moved away from an exclusive focus on the Poésies, to explore Mallarmé’s prose production and journalism (including La Dernière Mode, the ladies’ fashion magazine he single-handedly produced over several issues in 1874, writing under the pseudonyms Marguerite de Ponty and Miss Satin!), and his unfinished works, including the more personal poetry inspired by the death of his son, Anatole, in 1879.
Mallarmé died suddenly and unexpectedly on 8 September 1898, at the age of 56. His wife and daughter found a note on his desk exhorting them to burn his papers, insisting that “il n’y a pas là d’héritage littéraire” [there is no literary inheritance to be found there] (Correspondance complète, p. 642). In actual fact, his legacy to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been immeasurable. His emphasis on the poetic medium, over and above the poetic message, laid the foundations for twentieth-century Modernism, while his investigations into the aesthetic possibilities of chance in Un Coup de dés were taken up by the composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage. His impact on the domain of theory is also extremely important: he is the subject of important studies by critics including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Maurice Blanchot, but more importantly, his “poèmes critiques”, critical articles written in a complex poetic prose style, provide models for the use of language itself as an arena for the working-out of theoretical issues. Although the unattainable dream of the Great Work was never realized, the polished beauty of Mallarmé’s poetry continues to enthrall readers and critics alike, and has earned him a place in French literary history as one of its most influential and intriguing figures
Works cited
Bowie, Malcolm. Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Catani, Damian. The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism and Politics in Mallarmé. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Œuvres Complètes. 2 vols. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1998 and 2003.
- - -. Correspondance complète 1862-1871. Lettres sur la poésie. Ed. Bertrand Marchal. Paris: Gallimard, 1995.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Mallarmé: la lucidité et sa face d’ombre. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Scherer, Jacques. Le “Livre” de Mallarmé. Paris: Gallimard, 1977.
Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art? Introduction and notes by W. Gareth Jones. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1994.
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Citation: Shingler, Katherine. "Stéphane Mallarmé". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 October 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2896, accessed 09 June 2026.]
