French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine; Mallarmé was a provincial school teacher who came to Paris to live a bourgeois life on the rue de Rome, but published allusive, compressed poems, which suggested rather than denoted.
From the 1880s Mallarmé was the centre of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valéry, and Proust. Mallarmé's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. When Mallarmé started to write poetry in the 1850s', French poets were still rather obedient to certain conventions concerning rhyme, metre, theme, etc. Victor's Hugo's notion that 'pure poetry' is essentially 'useless' was widely accepted. Proust wrote once: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen".
Challenging his readers, Mallarmé sought out from a dictionary the long-forgotten meanings of common words and used these. Naturally this provoked a hostility, that followed Mallarmé through his career.
According to Mallarmé's theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lie the essence of perfect forms. It is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé's poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the point of a poem was the beauty of the language. "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words."
Each poem is built around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists of subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. However, he preferred to hint between the lines at meanings rather than state them clearly. The reader must return over and over again to the lines, concentrate on the music of the words rather than the referential meaning. Once he stated: "I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper."
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