After only one or two lines, though, you are engulfed in fine mist, and a certain terror sets in. Many of his poems take the form of sonnets, and many employ the twelve-syllable alexandrine, the meter of classical French tragedy. Mallarmé’s revolution arrived in an outwardly conservative guise. Such was the import of a note that I recently found in a library copy of Mallarmé’s selected letters: “Please pray that God would give me the patience and perseverance to get through this next week.” ![]() Upon his death, in 1898, he left behind a body of work so inscrutable that it still causes literature students to fall to their knees in despair. Arguably, the Amundsen of fin-de-siècle art-the first to plant a flag at an outer extreme of artistic possibility-was the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. ![]() The goal was to discover novel spheres of expression: the unspoken word, the unpainted image, the unheard sound. Illustration by Hugo GuinnessĪt the dawn of modernism, in the late nineteenth century, the activity of avant-garde artists often resembled rival expeditions into uncharted polar regions. ![]() After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in.
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