Stéphane Mallarmé
French Symbolist poet whose work inspired early 20th-century avant-garde movements.
Stéphane Mallarmé was a French poet and critic, a major figure in the Symbolist movement. His work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism.
- field
- Poetry, criticism
- nationality
- French
- known_for
- Major French Symbolist poet; influence on Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism; experimental typography in Un coup de dés
Lore & Background
He worked as an English teacher and spent much of his life in relative poverty, but was famed for his salons—occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house on the rue de Rome for discussions of poetry, art, and philosophy. The group became known as les Mardistes because they met on Tuesdays (mardi in French), and through it Mallarmé exerted considerable influence on a generation of writers. Regular visitors included W. B. His earlier work owes a great deal to Charles Baudelaire, while his later fin de siècle style anticipates fusions between poetry and the other arts.
Reader's Guide
Mallarmé's significance lies in his role as a major French Symbolist poet whose work anticipated and inspired Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. His later poetry explored the relationship between content and form, especially the arrangement of words and spaces on the page, as seen in Un coup de dés. This work has been suggested to have influenced the conception of hypertext, allowing multiple non-linear readings. His phonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in translation.
Did You Know?
- Mallarmé's Tuesday salons, known as les Mardistes, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life for many years.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Stéphane Mallarmé important to 20th-century art and literature?
His ideas about suggestion, the autonomy of the poem, and the breaking of fixed formal rules directly inspired several early-20th-century avant-garde movements, including Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Artists and writers in those movements looked to his work as a model for dismantling inherited conventions of form and meaning.
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