French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine. Stéphane 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. He saw that his purified language gives "a purer meaning to the words of the tribe." During his lifetime, Mallarmé never gained wide recognition for his work. He insisted that he wasn't such a difficult writer.

...
That error flees before the chaste nymph's eyes,
As blue and cold, Faun, as a weeping stream.
But, for the other, would she not compare,
All sighs, to day's warm breezes in your fleece?
No! through this immobile lassitude
That stifles any protest from cool morning,
No water murmurs but the harmony
My flute pours on the grove; the only wind,
Quick to exhale from the two pipes, before
It dissipates the sound in arid rain,
Is, on the smooth horizon nothing moves,
The visible, serene, and artificial breath
Of inspiration, homing to the sky.
(from 'The Afternoon of a Faun' (1865), in Selected Poetry and Prose by Stephane Mallarmé, edited by Mary Ann Caws, New Directions, 1982, p. 35)

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris. His father, Numa Mallarmé, and maternal great-grandfather, Blaise Magnien, had made a noteworthy career in the French civil service. Stéphane was only five years old when his mother, Elizabeth Desmolins Mallarmé, died of rheumatoid arthritis. Numa married then the nineteen-year-old daughter of a retired captain in the artillery.

At the age of eight, Mallarmé was sent to a boarding-school. He was expected to follow the family tradition but at school he did not do well except in languages. Mallarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Victor Hugo. At the age of nineteen he found Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, which had appeared in 1857. Under its influence he wrote 'Brise marine' (Sea Breeze) starting with the much quoted line "La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres" (The flesh is sad, alas! and I've read all the books!).

After leaving school Mallarmé visited England and while in London he married Marie Gerhard, the daughter of a a primary schoolteacher. His friends said the she was too old for him (Marie was born in 1835) and she was not pretty. "No I am marrying Marie solely because I know that without me she will not be able to live," Mallarmé wrote to his friend, Henri Cazalis, "and because I shall have poisoned her pure existence . . . No, Henri I am not doing this for me but for her alone. Only you in the whole world will know the sacrifice I am making." (Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé by Gordon Millan, Secker & Warburg, 1994, p. 79)

Mallarmé taught English from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon, and Paris until his retirement in 1893. The solitary years in Tournon and Besançon were his years of apprenticeship, during which he prepared himself for his career as a man of letters.

Mallarmé's poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s. His first important poem, 'L'Azur,' was published when he was 24. All his life he spent a very long time on each of his poems, making them as perfect as possible. In between writing, he suffered from bouts of physical illness and metaphysical anguish. During the 1870s, he was one of the few literary figures who defended the artistic vision Éduoard Manet in the press. Mallarmé wrote 'Le jury de peinture pour 1874 et M. Manet' (1874) for La Renaissance littéraire et artistique and  'The Impressionists and Édouard Manet' (1876) for a London journal, introducing his British readership to Manet's "open air" painting. For ten years, Mallarmé went to Manet's studio every day. In the 1860s, the young Émile Zola acted as Manet's spokesman.

To cheer up his friend, Manet illustrated L'Après-Midi d'un faune (1865-67; published in 1876), Mallarmé's best-known work, with woodcuts. He had illustrated Mallarmé's prose translation of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven'. For this illustration Manet used Japanese Sumi ink, ideal for calligraphy. Le Corbeau, published in 1875, sold very few copies. Dante Gabriel Rossetti owned a copy of the book, who wrote in a letter to his friend: "Bye the bye, my own memento of O´S [O´Shaughnessy] is a huge folio of litographed sketches from the Raven, by a French idiot named Manet, who certainly must be the greatest and most conceited ass who ever lived. A copy should be bought for every hypochondriacal ward in lunatic asylums. To view it without a guffaw is impossible." (Manet, 1832-1883: Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, April 22-August 8, 1983, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 10-November 27, 1983, p. 381) Baudelaire's version of 'The Raven' (Le Corbeau) appeared in L'Artiste in March 1853.

Claude Debussy had set Mallarmé's poem 'Apparation' to music in 1882, but their first meeting took place years later. L'Après-Midi d'un faune inspired Debussy's tone poem, first performed in 1894. It became his most popular orchestral work. 

Originally Debussy had planned to write a three-part composition on the poem, but only completed the 'Prelude.' The great Russian-born ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky made it the score for his ballet choreography, which was performed in 1912. Nijinsky played the role of the faun. Against all expectations, he made only one leap. At the end, the faun thrusts his body into a scarf the most beautiful nymph has left behind. This sexual act shocked the premiere audience, but the producer Serghei Diaghilev commissioned a repeat performance and it was danced again. When the national newspaper Le Figaro launched a campaign against the ballet, Auguste Renoir and Odilon Redon rushed to the dancer's defence. Diaghilev was delighted.

From time to time Debussy attended Mallarmé's Tuesday evening gatherings, which attracted such writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as André Gide, Paul Valéry and Oscar Wilde, the painters Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler, and the sculptor Rodin. "Certainly Mallarmé prepared his conversations," recalled Gide, "but he spoke with such art and in a tone that had so little of the doctrinal about it that it seemed as if he had just that instant invented each new proposition". ('Debussy, Mallarmé, and "Les Mardis"' by Rosemary Lloyd, in Debussy and His World, edited by Jane Fulcher, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 257) 

The Afternoon of the Faun presents the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. "I'd love to make them linger on, those nymphs / So fair / their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air / dowsy with tousled slumbers. / Did I love a dream?  ('A Favn in the Afternoon,' in Collected Poems and Other Verse, translated with notes by E H. and A. M. Blackmore, with an introduction by Elizabeth McCombie, Oxford University Press,  2006, p. 39)

Mallarmé began to write the poems while working in Tournon, a town he found ugly and unpleasant. For Claude Debussy he wrote in December 1894 after coming from the concert: "what a marvel! your illustration of 'The Afternoon of a Faun' offers no dissonance with my text, except that it goes further, truly, in nostalgia and light, with finessa, and richness". (Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle by Rosemary H. Lloyd, Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 154) When Debussy published the score in the following year, he said in the introduction: "the music in this Prelude in a very free illustration of Mallarmé's beautiful poem; it makes no claim to be a synthesis of the poem." (Ibid., p. 154)

Between the years 1867 and 1873 Mallarmé did not finish any of his large poetical works, Hérodiade (1869) included. Among Mallarmé's later publications are Toast funèbre, which was written in memory of the author Théophile Gautier, and the experimental poem, one of his masterpieces, Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1914, A Throw of the Dice) came out posthumously in book form.

Following the death of his son Anatole in 1879, Mallarmé poured his sorrow into informal notes, intended as a part of a projected book. These anguished fragments were published in 1961 under the title Pour un tombeau d'Anatole (A Tomb For Anatole). Paul Auster, who translated the fragments into English, said in the introduction of the book, that Mallarmé felt himself responsible for the disease that led to Anatole's death; his motivation was to "transmute Anatole into words and thereby prolong his life. He would, literally, resurrect him, since the work of building a tomb—a tomb of poetry —would obliterate the presence of death." (A Tomb for Anatole, translated with an introduction by Paul Auster, North Point Press, 1983, p. xi)

From the 1880s Mallarmé was the center of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valéry, and Proust. Camille  Mauclair depicted Mallarmé in the roman à clef Le Soleil des morts (1898).

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. Mallarmé's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. It has been argued that in Mallarmé's typographically innovative poem Un coup de dés (written in 1897) 'The Master' is an allusion to the figure of Hugo;  he sinks beneath the waves, "surrounded by the wreckade of his alexandrines." (Victor Hugo by Graham Robb, Picador, 1997, pp. 537-538)

Proust said of Mallarmé: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen," and Mallarmé's friend, the painter Edgar Degas, came out from a eulogy he was giving,  crying "I do not understand, I do not understand." ('Mallarmé the Magnificent' by Charles Rosen, The New York Review, May 20, 1999)

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. To Proust's attack he answered: "Every piece of writing, on the outside of its treasure, must—out of respect for those from whom, after all, it borrows the language, for a different purpose—present with the words a meaning, even if an unimportant one: there is an advantage to turning away the idler, who is charmed that nothing here concerns him at first sight." ('Mallarmé and the Transfiguration of Poetry,' in Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature by Charles Rosen, Harvard University Press, 2012, p. 359)

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." Thus a poem should be read as an object independent of the world in which it existed.

But sometimes Mallarmé became bored of the limits of words and his own "rules" of poetry. Not not even an idyllic setting can soothe him: "The flesh is sad—and I've read every book. / O to escape—to get away! Birds look / as though they're drunk for unknown spray and skies. / No ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes, / nothing can hold this heart steeped in the sea— / not my lamp's desolate luminosity / nor the blank paper guarded by its white / nor the young wife feeding her child, O night!" (from 'Sea Breeze' (Brise Marine), in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006, p. 25)

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. "Nommer un object, c'est supprimer les trois-quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est fait peu à peu: le suggérer." 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 in a letter: ". . . no, my dear poet, except by clumsiness or awkwardness, I am not obscure the moment one reads me in order to seek what I have set forth above, or the manifestation of an art which makes use—let us say incidentally, I know the profound cause—of language: and I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper." ('Mallarmé and the Transfiguration of Poetry,' p. 361)

For the rest of his life Mallarmé devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarmé died in Paris, on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. Mallarmé's vers libre had a huge influence on twentieth century French poetry, and in the creation of the modernist tradition in German and American poetry.

For further reading: Toward the Poems of Mallarmé by Robert Greer Cohn (1965); Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarme by Joseph Chiarie (1970); The Aesthetics of Stephane Mallarme in Relation to His Public by Paula Gilbert Lewis (1976); Stephane Mallarme Twentieth-Century Criticism 1901-1971 by Hampton D. Morris (1977); Mallarme and the Symbolist Drama by Haskell Block (1977); The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé by Leo Bersani (1982); Eros Under Glass: Psychoanalysis and Mallarme's Herodiate by Mary Ellen Wolf (1987); Mallarme's Divine Transposition by Peter Dayan (1987); Stephane Mallarme by F.C. St. Aubyn (1989); Mallarme's Divagations by Robert Greer Cohn (1991); The Poetics of the Occasion by Marian Zwerling Sugano (1992); The Fiction of the Poet: From Mallarmé to the Post-Symbolist Mode by Anna Balakian (1992); Performance in the Texts of Mallarme by Mary Lewis Shaw (1993); A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stéphane Mallarmé by Gordon Millan (1994); The Name of the Poet by Michael Temple (1995); Boulez and Mallarmé: A Study in Poetic Influence by Mary Breatnach (1996); Unlocking Mallarmé by Graham Robb (1996); Remembering the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett by Adam Piette (1996); Unfolding Mallarme by Roger Pearson (1997); Mallarmé in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Robert Greer Cohn (1998); Toward the Poems of Mallarme by Robert Greer Cohn (2000); Mallarmé And The Poetics Of Everyday Life. A Study of the Concept of the Ordinary in his Verse and Prose by Hélène Stafford (2000); The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarme by Damian Catani (2002); The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture by  Anna Sigrídur Arnar (2015); Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-garde Art and Language after Mallarmé by Trevor Stark (2020); Stéphane Mallarmé, l'homme poursuit noir sur blanc by Federica Locatelli; préface de Fabio Scotto (2022)

Selected works:

• Hérodiade, 1864-1887
  - Herodiade (translated by Joseph T. Shipley, 1921) / Herodias (translated by Clark Mills, 1940) / Herodias: Canticle of John the Baptist (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) 
• Le Corbeau / E.A. Poe, 1875 (translator)
• L'Après-Midi d'un faune, 1876
  - The Afternoon of the Faun (translated by Roger Fry, in The Poems of Mallarmé, 1936) / A Faun in the Afternoon (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006)  
  - Faunin iltapäivä: valitut runot (suom. Einari Aaltonen, 2006)
  - This poem inspired Claude Debussy to compose in 1894 his Prélude à l'aprés-midi d'un faune , the score was published in the following year; choreographed and danced by Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in 1912
• Prosa, 1880
• L'Étoile des fées / Mrs. W.-C. Elphinstone Hope, 1881 (translator)
• Poésies, 1887
  - Poésies / Poetical Works (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) 
• Album de vers et de prose, 1887
• Les Poèmes d'Edgar Poe, 1888 (translator)
• Le Ten o'clock / M. Whistler, 1888 (translator)
• Pages, 1891
• La musique et les lettres, 1891
• Vers et prose, 1893
• Divagations, 1897
  - Divagations (translated by Barbara Johnson, 2007)
• Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897 / 1914
  - Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (translated by Brian Coffey, 1965) / A Cast of Dice Never Can Annul Chance (translated by Neil Crawford, 1985) / A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, in To Purify the Words of the Tribe (translated by Paul Herron, 1999) / A Dice Thrown At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance (translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) / A Roll of the Dice (translated by Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark, 2015)
  - Nopanheitto (suom. Helena Sinervo, 2006)
•  Poésies, 1899
  - Poésies / Poetical Works, in Collected Poems and Other Verse (translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, 2006)
• Madrigaux, 1920 (with Raoul Dufy)
• Vers de circonstance, 1920
  - Vers de circonstances/Occasional Verses, in Collected Poems and Other Verse (translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, 2006)
• Contes indiens, 1927
• Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1928
• The Poems of Mallarmé, 1936 (translated by Roger Fry)
• Oeuvres complètes, 1945 (ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry)
• Propos sur la poésie, 1953
• Lettres, 1959
• Correspondance, 1959-1985 (11 vols.)
• Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, 1961 (introduction by Jean-Pierre Richard)
  - A Tomb For Anatole (translated by Paul Auster, 1983) / Notes for ‘Anatole’s Tomb’ (translated by Patrick McGuinness, 2002) / For Anatole’s Tomb (translated by Patrick McGuinness, 2003)
• Les "Gossips", 1962 (ed. by H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry)
• Selected letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1988 (edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd)
• Stephane Mallarmé: Selected Poems, 1989 (translated by C. F. Macintyre)
• Œuvres complètes, 1989 (edited by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry)
• Lettres à Méry Laurent / Stéphane Mallarmé, 1996 (edited by Bertrand Marchal)
• Collected Poems by Stephane Mallarmé, 1996 (reissued edition, translated by Henry Weinfield)
• Mallarmé, 1998 (edited by Bertrand Marchal)
• Oeuvres complètes, I, 1998 (edited by Bertrand Marchal)
• Correspondance: compléments et suppléments, 1998 (edited by Nicola Luckhurst)
• To Purify the Words of the Tribe: The Major Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarmé, 1999 (translated by Daisy Aldan)
• Mallarme in Prose, 2001 (edited by Mary Ann Caws, translated by Jill Anderson)  
• Oeuvres complètes, II, 2003 (edited by Bertrand Marchal)
• Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006 (traslated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, with an introduction by Elizabeth McCombie)
• Correspondance / Félix Fénéon, Stéphane Mallarmé, 2007 (edited by Maurice Imbert)
• Mallarmé-Morisot: correspondance 1876-1895, 2009 (edited by Olivier Daulte and Manuel Dupertuis)
• De la lettre au livre, 2010 (edited by Pierre-Henry Frangne)
• The Poems in verse, 2012 (translation and notes by Peter Manson)
• Azure: Poems and Selections from the "Livre", 2015 (a new translation by Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez)
  
• Un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard = a blow of dice will never abolish chance, 2018 (2 vols., translation by Holly Cundiff; illustrations by Odilon Redon)
  
• Correspondance: 1854-1898 / Stéphane Mallarmé, 2019 (édition établie, présentée et annotée par Bertrand Marchal; ouvrage publié sous la direction de Jean-Yves Tadié)