I 841

as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help Us to gather up what

might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of
thought."8 The theory or idea or system which requires of tis the sacrifice of
any part of this experience, in consideration of some ihterest into whiCh we
cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves,
or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.
One of the most .beautiful passages of Rousseau 9 is that in the sixth book
of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary
sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now
in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked
himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that
remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he
that it must be by intellectual exdtement, which he found just theh
in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. I Well! we are all condamnes, as Victor
Hugo says: we'are all under sentence of"death but with a sort of indefinite
reprieve-les hommes sont tous condamnes q' mort avec des sursis indefinis: 2
we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this
interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at among "the
children ohhis world,"3 in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding
that intenial, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.
Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow
of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested Or otherwise,
which come naturally to many of us. Only to be sure' it is passion-that it
does yield you this fruit of a qUickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such
wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own
sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but
the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those
moments' sake.
1873, 1893
Comte . (1798-1857), French positivist philoso- ... The editor' Donald L. Hili has pointed oLit that
pher. . Rousseau, in his Confess/oJlS, nowhere I'nt!ntions
8. From Les Mis4...ble. (1862). by Victor Hugo reading the Frenc!h .. Enlightenment philosopher
(1802-1885), the leader of the Romantic move- and writer Voltaire (Fran\;ols-Marle Arouet. '1694-
ment fn Fran'ce. 1778). .
9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Swiss- 2. Men are all condemned to death with Indefinite
born French philosopher and political theorist; his reprieves (French). From Hugo. The LaiF'f)i>y of a
Confessions were pUblished in J 2 books (1781, Person (1832).
1788). 3. LUke 16.8.

STEPHANEMALLARME .'
1842-1898

"Such is my 'life, devoid of anecdote," wrote to Paul Verlaine,

who had asked him to provide biographical information for a headnote in an anthology
of contemporary poets. responded by describing a life entirely subordinate
to writing: IfI have always dreamed and attempted something else, with the patience
:of an alchemist; ready to sacrifice all vanity and satisfaction, as people once. burned
'their furniture and their roof-beams, to stoke the fires of the Great Work .... The
842 I

Orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet and the literary
game par exceII«mce: the very rhythm of the book, coming alive impersonaIIy all the
way down to its pagination, would take its p.ace alongside the equations of this dream,
or Ode." Writipg ,with a combination of grandiosity and modesty, Mailarme spent a
lifetime describing and exploring the tensions inherent not in personal life but in a
poetry that to the c'ondition of music, mathematics, metaphysics, and myth.
Born in 1842 td a family of Parisian functionaries, Mallarme spent his childhood
in various boarding schools after the death of his mother in 1847. Married in 1863,
he worked as a high school English teacher for the next thirty years, unhappily and
unsuccessfuIIy. (He claimed to have learned English in order to read EDGAR ALLAN
POE.) To make ends meet, he undertook to write textbooks for language and literature
instruction, cursing the amount of time these texts forced him to take away from what
he saw as his true vocation, the invention of an entirely new kind of poetry. 'At his
death in 1898, he considered his Great Work barely' begun. Of the 1,659 pages
included in the 1945 PIeiade edition of Mallarme's works, fewer than 100 contain
what he considered serious poems (a proportion still smaller in the uP4ated edition),
and even those he referred to as mere "calling cards." '
How did a poet who wrote so little come to be known as the Master of French
Symbolism? On the one hand, by holding weekly meetings at his Paris apartment,
where he dazzled a whole generation of poets with opaque yet suggestive discourses
no one could remember. On the other, by locating his writing within its own
impossibility. The "vibratory near-disappearance;" the "almost nothing," the "stilled
ode. in the blanks" of his texts were paradoxes of writing, exploring while collapsing
the differences betweeh language and silence, presence and absence, verse and prose.
And he always exaggerated his lack of accomplishment: his notoriously difficult poems
exerted a tremendous fascination on his contemporaries, and even in his textbooks
and in the fashion journal, La Mode (The Latest Fashion); which he wrote
singlehandedly for four months, he worked out sustained, innovative aesthetic and
linguistic theories. .
In his later years, Mallarl1!e invented what he called the "critical poem," a genre of
theoretical text as stylistically dense and complex as his verse. "Crisis in Poetry"
(1896), our selection, belongs to that genre. In all of Mallarme's writing, the distinc-
tion between "poetry" and "theory" breaks down: every text is a lesson in how language
works, weaving and unweaving the poetic act that it itself is in the process of not
quite accomplishing. The materiality of page, ink, paragraph, and spacing is often
just as important as the logic of syntax, figure, and sense.
The crisis in poetry about which Mallarme writes is in one sense peCUliarly French.
The classical French verSe form, codified by de Malherbe in the early seven-
teenth century and exempJified by PIERRE CORNEILLE, Jean Racine, and Jean-Baptiste
Moliere, was the alexandrine-a line of twelve syllables divided into two halves,
or "hemistichs," by a pause ca,lIed a caesura. For almost three centuries, the rules
of prosody were strictly observed. Even the displacement of the caesura from its
central position in the line caused an uproar when Victor Hugo dared to attempt it
in 1830 (in his play Hernani). But as of 1886, just after the death of Hugo, the poetic
line seemed to MaIIarme to be breaking up altogether. Poets were writing in "free
verse." To a French ear, accustomed to counting syllables and evaluating rhyme, this
was a revolution. Mallarme even goes so far as to treat it as a kind of second French
RevolutioIi.
But in another sense, in MaIIarme's account of the "crisis," this "liberation" of verse
is merely. a way of rediscovering Language itself and is not, strictly speaking, confined
to French: all languages mobilize sound and sense, rhythm and rhyme, deploying
words as material, sensual objects with properties that go beyond their meanings,
with connotations that create networks of effects, as well as with syntax and rhetoric
that provide structure and suggestion. The sounds of words may be related to their
meaning, but the very existence of multiple languages indicates that that relation is
 MALLARMe / 843

not one of perfect reflection. Mallarme notes that unlike God, we do not speak words
that are themselves the things they name. While God can say "Let there be light,"
and there is light, in French the spoken word jour (day) has a dark vowel sound while
nuit (night) has a light sound. But our ability to. notice this lack of attunement
between sound and sense leads us to imagine a virtual language that would be per-
fectly in tune with itself. One might think that this perfect language would be pure
poetry, but Mallarme does not exactly say so. In fact, he claims that if this language
existed, verse itself would not exist, because verse consists of compensating for the
failings of language, creating a "total word, new, unknown to the language," sus-
pending the multiple facets of an idea so that its fragments balance in a kind of
"universal musicality."
Mallarme was not the only symbolist whose highest ambitions for poetry were
expressed in terms of music. Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) had already asked for "music
above all things." And Richard Wagner, the German Romantic composer (1813-
1883), had considerable influence on French poetry. That influence sprang less from
his music than from his imperfectly understood but enthusiastically endorsed theory
of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work of art, which would combine J11usic, dance,
theater, painting, and poetry. When MallarJ11e speaks of Music, he refers siJ11ulta-
neously to two different things: a systeJ11 of sounds that appeals directly to the senses
and emotions, and a systeJ11 of pure relations and intervals that has no referential but
only a structural existence.
"Crisis in Poetry" offers a critique of two dominant aesthetic theories of the nine-
teenth century: namely, realism and ROJ11anticisJ11. About realism, Mallarme suggests
that a book can offer only "allusions," "suggestions"-effects-not any real object,
"on which the pages would have difficulty closing." By describing realism as a book
trying to enclose a palace, he is saying (somewhat humorously) that reality cannot be
presented directly, that any realism is already an interpretation of the real. About
RomanticisJ11, Mallarme critiques the notion that the "personal breath" or voice of
the individual poet controls the meaning of the poem. Rather, he claims, in pure
poetry the initiative is taken by words themselves in their clashes and rhymes. For
Mallarme, the poet is absent and anonymous. Intentionality and inspiration are
eclipsed by the workings of language itself: the poet's voice is "stilled." Convinced
that all poets are attempting to write the same Book, Mallarme sees poetry as eternal,
canonical, and unified rather than historically, culturally, and politically diverse. Mal-
Jarme's concept of poetic anonymity is thus at the farthest remove from VIRGINIA
WOOLF's. When Woolf claimed in 1929 that "anonymous was a woman," she was
referring to the fact that creative women have often been deprived of a place in history
and a proper name. For Mallarme, poetic anonymity is a sign not of dispossession
but of cultural authority-precisely the kind of cultural authority that has ofte1i .
deprived women of voice.
In Mallarme's "Crisis in Poetry," the importance of the "liberation" of verse lies
less in the actual accomplishments of writers in free verse than in the dissolution of
the old distinction between verse and prose. In another essay, titled "Music and
Letters" and first delivered as a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge in 1894, Mallarme
goes so far as to say that "prose does not exist": there is "verse" as soon as there is
style, as s(mn as there is any linguistic residue of effectiveness beyond pure instru-
mentality (what he calls the "journalistic" or "commercial" use of language). Ironi-
cally, Mallarme himself never wrote in free verse. However difficult or "unknown to
the language" his late poems may be, they observe classical forms of prosody. But he
did undertake one experiment that was definitely not "classical," at least in its form.
In A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897), Mallarme positioned lines
of varying lengths and sizes in different places on the page, letting a long conducting
sentence be surrounded by subordinate clauses and typefaces, and sculpting the
hlanks as well as the writing. This stretching of the spacing of syntax to the breaking
point, this exposure of the materiality of writing, and this recognition of the poetic
844 /

line as an art of flows and interruptions have had a niajor impact on twentieth-century
poetry and theory.
, Indeed, French critics and theorists have been not only attenti,ve to",but also influ-
enced by, the writings of It was largely by learning the lessqn of
that critics like ROLAND BARTHES came to speak of "the death of the author" in the
making of literature; Rather than seeing the text as the 'emanation of an individual
author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns
of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax,spacing,fntertextuality,
sound, semantics, ,etymology, and.even individual letters. The theoretical styles of
JACQUES DERRIDA, JULIA KRISTE:VA, and especially JACQUES LACAN also owe a great
deal to "critical poem."

BIBLIOGRAPHY
There are two authoritative French editions works: the PMiade Oeuvres
first edited by Henri Mondor q. (1945) and updated by
Bertrand Ma'rchal (I998) and the Ftammarion Poesies, edited by Carl-Paul Barbier
and Charles Gordon Millan (1983). An excellent English translation by "'enry
field 'of prose and verse poems, Collected Poems, published in a
bilingual edition (1994), but' there is no complete translation of the critical prose.
Robert Greer Cohn, in Mallarnu!'s Divagations: A Guide and (1990),
offers a useful blend of paraphrase and commentary. Br"dford Cook translated a
collection of poems, essays, and letters titled Mallaf"ltli:,Selected,Prqse Poems, Essays,
and Letters (I956), and Mary Ann Caws edited his Sel8cie.d Poetry and Pr;oSiJ (1982).
Our printed as an appendix to Lloyd's
His, Circle (i 999), a useful contextualization. Lloyd also translated The ,selected Let-
ters of Stiphane ,Mallarnu! (1988), which many of ,best-kn9V\11l
statements poetry., For a, well-researched in English,
Millan, MallarmC§:A 'throw of Dice (I 994). ,,' , '
The qiticism rearlldike a history of,twentieth:€entury devel-
opments.in French criticism.rp..ore geneif!.Ily. Arst readers, including
first editOl; and J:>i9grapher, Henri Mondor (a doctor: ""ho 'owned of
papers), lhe, metaphysical, aspirations of, poetic
project. An important eiUtmple is Albert Thibaudet's La Pohle Stephane Mctlla,me
(1912). Reacting',against perc:eived the exill-
tentialist jeancl'aul Sartre complained that literature had. its back on life and
separated the aesthetic from political engagement (Maliarml, or the Poet of Nothing-
1986; trans. 1988;a150 5e,e our selectio,n below (rom What fsLiteridure?). A
good sampling, of diverse appro$ches to be found Mallarml,
edited by Harold Bloom (1987), and in Literary Deb'a'te: ConteX,ts, editedby
Denis Hollier and jeffrey Mehlman (1999). Jacques Derrida; hi (1972;
1981), analyzes displacement of c.1assical, Platonic concepts of
mimesis; and Julia Kristeva, in Revoiution in Language (19,74. partial trans.,
1984), uses the example of MaIiarml! tei define her concepts of "ihesemloth::" and
"negativity" In poetry. Excellent studies by crt,tlcs in English Include Malcolm Bowie's
Mallarml and,the Art of Being DWicult (1978) and Leo Bersenl's 'I1Ie peat" of SUo
"hane Malla,-,nl (1982). Other recent studies of Mallarmc!'s theorY' and practice of
poetic languagelndude Temple, The Natne of ,the Poet (1995); Graham
Rohh, Vnloc1dng Mallarnu! ( 1996); Roger Pearson, Mallarnu! (1996); and
Richard Cliitdid$ Smith, Mallarmi's Children (1999). A collection of
with legacy in France is j\,feetings with lW'allarmi, by Micha'el
pie (1998). For a hihli,ographicsl overview of twentieth-century criticism, see O.
Hampton Morris's Stephane Mallarml:, Twentieth-Century Criticism (1989).
 CRISIS IN POETRY I 845

Crisis in Poetryl

Just now, abandoning any possibility of action, with the lassitude brought
about by one afternoon after another of distressing bad weather,2 I let fall,
without any curiosity but with the feeling of having read it all twenty years
ago, the thread of multicolored pearls .thatstud the rain, once more, in the
glimmer of booklets in the bookshelves. Many a work under the bead-curtain
will send out its own scintillation: as, in a mature sky against the window
pane, I love to follow the lights of a storm.
Our phase, which is recent, is, if not closing, taking breath or· perhaps
stock: considering it attentively reveals the creative and fairly sure will power
driving it.
Even the press, which usually needs twenty years to discover the news, is
suddenly preoccupied with the subject, and on time.
Literature here is undergoing an exquisite crisis, a 'fundamental crisis.
Whoever grantS that function a place, whether 01' not it be the first place,
recognizes in this the substance of current affairs. We are observing, as a
finale to the century not what last century observed,3 not disruptions; but,
outside the public arena, a trembling of the veil in the temple revealing
significant folds, and to some extent, its tearing,down. 4
French readers, their habits disrupted by the death of Victor Hugo,' can-
not fail to be disconcerted. Hugo, in his mysterious task, turned all prose,
philosophy, eloquence, history, to verse, and as he was verse personified, he
confiscated from any thinking person, anyone who talked; or told stories, all
but the right to speak. A monument in this desert, with silence far away; in
a crypt, thus lies the godhead of a majestic and unconscious idea, to wit that
the form we call verse is simply in itself literature; that there is verse as soon
as diction is stressed, that there is rhythm as soon as style· is emphasized.
Poetry, I believe, waited respectfully until the giant who identified it with his
tenacious hand, a hand stronger than that of a blacksmith, ceased to exist;
waited until then before breaking up. The entire language, :tailored to met-
rics, now recovered its vital rhythms and escaped, in a' free disjunction of
thousands of simple elements; and, as I'II·show, it was not unlike the mul-
tiplicity of cries in an orchestra, but an orchestra remaining verbal. ..
The change dates from then: although it was surreptitiously and Unex-
pectedly prepared beforehand by Verlaine,6 who, fluid as he was, was called
back to primitive forms.
A witness to this adventure, in which people have asked me to playa more
efficacious role although such a role suits no one, I did at least take a fervent

I. "Crise de vera"; translated by Rosemary L1ord.
2. Le temps In French means "weather" as wei as
"time." By describing an Innocuous rainy day, Mal-
Is actually starting both his "news of the day"
sequence and his {'verse" sequence; the raindrops
are like beads of Rlass (1lerrolerie: from verrs,
"glasf;," which sauncls just like vers, "verse"). The
title of an earlier version of this essay brought the
two sequences together b.r using the word averse,
which means "shower" ('Averse ou critique," or
"Shower or Criticism," 1895).
3. That is, the French Revolution of 1789.
4. An allullon to the veil In the temple separating
off the Holy of Holies, which was said to be rent
'at the time of Christ's crucifixion to show that all
men, not merely high priests, could have access to
God (see Mark 15.38). In the same way, Mallarm/!
implies, the "veil" of prosody has been rent by the
discovery or free verse.
5. Prolific French Romantic poet, novelist, and
playwright (1802-1885).
6. Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), French poet
known for the mUSicality of his verse.
846 / ST';;PHANE

interest in it and the time has come to talk about it, preferably from a dis-
tance, since what took place did so aimost anonymously.
Let's grant 'that French poetry, because of the primary role played by rhyme
in creating its enchantment, has, in its evolution up to 61-lf tithe, proved to
be intermittent: for a time it gleams, fades and or
worn threadbare by repetitiol!' Does the need to write poetry, in response to
a variety of circumstances, now mean, after one of those periodical orgiastic
excesses of almost a century comparabie only to the Renaissance,7. that the
time has come for shadows and cooler temperatures? Not at all! It means
that the gleam continues, though changed. The recasting, a process normally
kept hidden, is taking place in public-,jby meaii.s of delicious approximations.
I think one caJ1 separate under a aspect treatment given to the
solemn canon of poetry, taking each in order. , .
That prosody, with its very brief rules, is nevertheless untouchable: it is
what points to acts of prudence, such as the hemistich, 8 and what regulates
the slightest effort at stimulating versification, like codes according to which
abstention from flying is for instance a necessary condition for standing
upright. 9 Exactly what one does not need td learn; because if you haven't
guessed it yourself beforehand, then you've proved the uselessness of con-
straining yourself to it.
The faithful supporters of the alexandrinei hexameter, I are loosening
from within the rigid and puerile mechanism 6f its beat; the ear, set free
from .an artificial counter, discovers in discerning on its own all the
possible combinations that twelve timbres can make amonllst themselves.
It's a taste we should coilSider very modem.
Let's take an intermediate case, in no way the least curious: .
The poet who possesses acute tact and who always' considers this alexan-
drine as the definitive jewel, but one you bring out as you would a sword or
a flower only rarely and only when there is some premeditated motive for
doing so, touches it modestly and play.s around it, lending it neighboring
chords, before bringing it out superb and unadorned. On many occasions he
lets his fingering falter on the eleventh syllable or it to the thir-
teenth. M. Henri de RegnierZ excels in these accompaniments, of his own
invention, I know, an invention as discrete and proud as the genius he instills
into it, and reveiatory of the fleeting disquiet felt by the performers faced
with the instrument they have inherited. Something else, could simply
be the opposite, reveals itself a.s a deliberate rebellion in the .absence of the
old mold, grown weary, when Jules Laforgue,3 from the outset, initiated us
into the unquestionable charm of the incorrect line.
So far, in each of the models I've just mentioned, nothing apart from
reserve and abandon, because of the lassitude caused by excessive recourse
to our national rhythm; whose use, like that of the flag, ought to remain an
exception. With this nevertheless amusing particularity that wHlful infrac-
7. That is, the Romantic period. (based on 6 metrical feet). "The alexandrine": the
8. Half a verse line. meter "f classical French verse, a 12.syllable line
9. Voler means both "to fly" and "to steal"; droitun! with a break (the caesura) in the middle, separat·
means "uprightness" in both the moral and the ing the two hemistich •. The English equivalent to
r.hysical sense. The sentence can thus also mean both Is Iambic pentameter.
'abstaining from stealing Is (not) a necessary con· 2. French poet and novelist (1864-1936), a faith·
dition of honesty." In this way, the "laws" of verse ful attender of Mallarm<!'s Tuesday gatherings.
are similar to the laws of gravity and honesty. 3. French poet (1860-1887), born in Uruguay,
I. The meter of Greek and Latin epic poetry known for his ironic, innovative verse.
 CRISIS IN POETRY / 847

tions or deliberate dissonances appeal to our delicacy, whereas, barely fifteen

years ago, the pedant that we have remained would have felt as exasperated
as if confronted with some ignorant sacrilege! I'll say that the memory of the
strict line of poetry haunts these games on the side and confers on them a
certain benefit.
The entire novelty, where free verse is concerned, resides not as the seven-
teenth century attributed verse to the fable or the opera (that was merely a
non-strophic arrangement4 of diverse famous meters) but in what it might
be suitable to call its "polymorphous" nature: and we should now envisage
the dissolution of the official number into whatever one wishes, as far as
infinity, provided that it contains a renewed source of pleasure. Sometimes
it's a euphony fragmented with the consent of an intuitive reader, someone
with inborn and precious good taste-just now, M. Moreas; or a languishing
gesture of dream, leaping up in passion and finding the right beat-that's
M. Viele-Griffin; beforehand it was M. Kahn with a very erudite notation of
the tonal value of words. I'm giving names, for there are others who are
typical, MM Charles Morice, Verhaeren, Dujardin, Mockel 5 and all, only as
a proof of what I'm saying, so that you can consult their publications.
What's remarkable is that, for the first time in the course of any nation's
literary history, concurrently with the great general and secular organs, in
which, following an inborn keyboard, orthodoxy expresses its exaltation, who-
evel' wishes to use his or her own techniques and individual hearing can
create a personal instrument on which to breathe, to touch or stroke with
skill; and it can be used on its own, and also be dedicated to the Language
in general.
A high freedom has been acquired, the newest: I don't see, and this
remains my own intensely felt opinion, that anything that has been beautiful
in the past has been eliminated, and I remain convinced that on important
occasions we will always conform to the solemn tradition, that owes its prev-
alence to the fact that it stems from the classical genius; only,'when what's
needed is a breath of sentiment or a story, there's no call to disturb the
venerable echoes, so we'll look to do something else. Every soul is a melody,.
which needs only to be set in motion; and for that we each have our own
flute or viola.
nn my view this is the belated eruption of a real condition or of a possibilitk .
that of not only expressing ourselves, but of bursting into song, as we see fit.
Languages, which are imperfect in so far as they are many, lack the
"upreme language: because thinking is like writing without instruments, not
a "vhispering but still keeping silent, the immortal word, the diversity of
idioms on earth, prevents anyone from proffering the words which otherwise
would be at their disposal, each uniquely minted and in themselves revealing
the material truth. This prohibition flourishes expressly in nature (you stum-
hie upon it with a smile) so that there is no reason to consider yourself God;
buf, as soon as my mind turns to aesthetics, I regret that speech fails to
express objects by marks that correspond to them in color and movement,

4. That is, not arranged in mctricnUy cOlnplex
(such as those characteristic of odes).
C;, All poets writing in French nnd experimenting
wjlh rH'" "erse:Jean Morea. (1856-1910), horn in
Crt·",·,·; Francis VieJe-Griffln (1864-1937), horn
in Virginia; Gustave Kahn (1859-1936); Charles
Morice (1861-1919); Emile VerhBeren (1855-
1916), born in Belgium; Edouard Dujardin (1861-
1949), foundel' of La Revue WaR ....rienn"; .. nd
Albert Mockel (1866-1945), born In Belgium.
848 I STEPHANI<: MALLARME

marks that exist in the instrument of the voice, among languages and some-
times in a single language. Compared to the word ombre (shadow) which is
opaque, (darkness) is not much blacker; how disappointing to dis-
cover the perversity that in contradictory fashion bestows on the word jour
(day, light) sounds that are dark, while those of nuit (night) are bright. 6 We
desire a word of brilliant splendor or conversely one that fades away; and as
for simple, luminous alternatives .... But, we should note, otherwise poetry
would not exist: philosophically, it is poetry that makes up for the failure of
language, providing an extra extension.
Strange mystery; and from intentions no less strangely mysterious metrics
burst forth in the days when everything was coming into being;
Let an average group of words, under the comprehension of the gaze, line
up in definitive traits, surrounded by silence.
If, in the French case, no private invention were to 'surpass the prosody
that we've inherited, there would be an outpouring of displeasure, as if a
singer were unable, away from others or walking where he pleased among
the infinite number of little flowers, wherever his voice met.a notation, to
pluck it .... This attempt took place just recently, and, leaving aside the
erudite research in the same direction, accentuation 7 and so forth, that has
been announced, I know that a seductive game leads, together with shreds
of the old still recognizable line, to the possibility of eluding it or revealing
it, rather than to a sudden discovery of something entirely alien. It just takes
the time needed to loosen the constraints and whip up some zeal, where the
school went astray. And it's very precious: but to go from that freedom to
imagine more, or simply to think that each individual brings a new prosody
arising from their own way of breathing-which is certainly how some people
spell-well it's a joke to cause much laughter and to inspire the preface·
writers to build their platforms. Similarity between lines of poetry and old
proportions, this will provide the regularity that will last because the poetic
act consists in sud(lenly seeing that an idea'splitll into a number of motives
of equal value and in grouping !hem; they rhyme: and to place 'an external
seal upon them we have their 'common Metrics which the final beat binds
together.
It is in the very interesting treatment meted out to versification in this age
ohecess and interregnum, no less than in our,virginal mental Circumstances,
that lies the crisis.
\;! To'hear the unquestionable ray of light-as features gild or tear a meander
of melodies: or Music rejoins Verse, to form, since Wagner;8 Poetry.
",It's not that one element or another moves away, advantageously, towards
ari'integrity triumphing somewhere else, in the form of a concert that
mute if it is not given voice, and' the poem, enunCiator: of their
tJUmtnunity or their new form, illuminating the instrumentation until it's
dbvibus under the veil, as elocution descends from the sky of sounds. The
01 ?h:
back to theories of language discussed tual verse; but since stresses do before
n; PlATO'S Craryl ... (ca. 385 H.C.E.), Mallarmj! pauses, It Is possible to shape their occurrence Into
l'IesCrlbes words as though their sounds could 1m 1- pattern•.
, tale rthe things they name; here, vowel lones are 8. Richard WAgner 0813-1883), German com-
i . ;.kIrechid io correspond to degrees of luminosity. poser, conductor, and author whose Influence was
:: In English, syllables In French words pervasive among late-19th-century French poet.
',; ft\!iIf1\o ",herent accent';, stress always falls on the eveh though his operas were largely banned In
r. lnt.ayllable of a word or group of words. French France after the Franco-Prusslan War (1870-71).
·lheMfondends itselfto syllabic rather than accen-
 CRISIS IN POETRY I 849

modern meteor, the symphony, at the pleasure of the musicians or unbe-

knownst to them, draws closer to thought, but a thought· which no longer
draws on current expressions.
Some explosion of Mystery into all the skies of its impersonal magnifi-
cence, where the orchestra should not have failed to influence the ancient
effort which has long sought to extract it from the mouth of the race.
A double indication arises from this-
Decadent or mystic, 9 the schools describe themselves or are given labels
hastily by our news media,] and adopt, as meeting point, an Idealism 2 which
(like fugues or sonatas) refuses the ·natural materials and brutally demands
an exact thought to put them in order, so as to keep nothing but the mere
suggestion. To create an exact relationship between the images, in such a
way that a third aspect, fusible and light, and whose presence can be divined,
will break free ... We've abolished the pretension-an aesthetic error,
although one that has commanded masterpieces 3 -of including on the subtle
paper of the volume anything other than for instance the horror of the forest
or the silent thunder scattered through the foliage, not the intrinsic and
dense wood of the trees. A few bursts of the intimate pride truthfully trum-
peted awaken the architecture of the palace, the only place where one can
dwell; no stone, on which the pages would have difficulty closing.
"Monuments, the sea, the human face, in their plenitude, and as they are,
preserving a virtue which is more attractive than if they were veiled by a
description; call it evocation, or allusion, suggestion: that somewhat random
terminology bears witness to the tendency, a very decisive tehdency perhaps,
that literary art has experienced, a tendency that limits it and dispenses it.
Literature's witchery, if ·it is not to liberate from a fistful of dust or reality
without enclosing it in the book, even as a text, that volatile dispersion which
is the mind, which has nothing to do ·with anything but the musicality of
everything."4 '
Speech· has no connection with the reality of things except in matters
commercial; where literature is concerned,· speech is content merely to make
allusions or to distill the quality contained in some idea.
On this condition the song burst forth, as a lighthearted joy.
This ambition, I call Transposition-Structure is something else.
The pure work of art implies the elocutionary disappearance of
who yields the initiative to words, set in motion by the clash of their- ine-
qualities; they illuminate each other with reciprocal lights like a virtual trail
of fire on precious stones, replacing the perceptible breath of the old lyric
or the individual enthusiastic direction of the sentence.
An order of the book of verse springs from it, innate or pervasive, and
eliminates chance; such an order is essential, to omit the author: well, a
subject, destined, implies amongst the elements of the whole, a certain
accord as to the appropriate place for it within the volume. This is a possi-

9. Movements that were literary reactions against
19th-century bourgeois realism, positivism, and
]. Despite his professed scorn for journalism,
Mallarmc! at this time often portrays himself as a
PUTveYOT of news. When asked to .peak in England
on the state of French poetry, he announced, "1 do
.irideed bring news: verse has been tumpered with."
2. A teTm ·(Iike Spirit and Idea) that in MallaTmc!
Is often seen as having Platonic OT Hegelian sig-
nificance, referring to ultimate metaphy,;ical real-
Ities.
3. That is, ..,alist novels.
4. quotes his own "Music and Letters"
(1894), originally delivered In England.
850 / STEPHANE MALLARME

bility brought about by the fact that each cry has its echo-in the same way
motifs balance each other, from a distance, producing neither the incoherent
sublimity of the romantic pagination, nor that artificial unity of more recent
times, measured out to the book en bloc., Everything becomes suspense, a
fragmentary disposition with alternatiorts and oppositions, all working
towards the total rhythm of the white spaces, which would be the poem
silenced; but it is translated to some extent by each p«;Jn,dant. 1 want to con-
sider it as instinct, perceived in these publications and, if the supposed type
does not remain separate from complementary types, youth, for, once, in
poetry where a dazzling and harmonious plenitude imposes itself, has stut-
tered the magic concept of the Work. 5 Some symmetry, in parallel fashion,
which, from the situation of lines in the poem that are linked to the
authenticity of the poem within the volume, fly beyond it, several of them
inscribing on the spiritual plane the amplified signature of the genius, .anon-
ymous and perfect as an artistic existence.
A chimera,6 having thought of it proves, from the reflection of its scales,
how much the current cycle or this last quarter century, is undergoing some
absolute illumination-whose wild shower on my window panes wipes,away
the dripping murkiness sufficiently to illuminate those panes-that, more or
less, all books contain the fusion of some counted repetitions: even if there
were only one-the world's law-a bible of the kind nations simulate. The
difference from one work to another offers, as many lessons set forth in an
immense competition for the true text, between the ages termed civilized
or-lettered.
Certainly 1 never sit down on the terraces to hear a concert without glimps-
ing amidst the obscure sublimity some sketch of one or other of humanity's
immanent,poems or their original state, all the more comprehensible for not
being spoken, and I see that to determine its vast line the composer experi-
enced that easy suspension of even the temptation to express it. 1 imagine,
through a no doubt prejudice of writers, that nothing will
remain if it is not given form; a form we have reached, the stage, precisely,
of seeking out, faced with a break in the great literary rhythms (I discussed
this above) and their dispersal into shivers articulated in ways close to instru-
mentation. An art of achieving the transposition in the Book of the symphony
or simply to take back our own: for there is no question that it is not the
elementary sounds produced by the brass, strings, woods, but the intellectual
word at its purest point that must lead, with plenitude and undeniably as the
ensemble of links existing within everything, to Music.
An undeniable longing of my time has been to separate as if for different
purposes the double state of the word, raw and immediate on the one hand,
on the other, essential.
Telling, teaching, even describing, that's all very well and yet all that would
be needed perhaps for each of us to exchange our thoughts as humans would
be to take from or leave in the hand of another a coin, in silence, but the
elementary use of speech serves the universal reporting in which all the
contemporary written genres participate, .wlth the exception of literature.

5, The (Great) Work, another name for the phI-
losophers' stone, sought by the alchemists to turn
base metals into gold. Mallarmt! saw alchemy as an
origin not only of aesthetics but also of political
economy.
6. Literally, In Greek mythology a'!ire-breathlng
monster with a lion's head, a goat's body; and a
serpent's tail; more generally, anything composed
of incongruous parts, or an illusory mental fabri-
cation.
 HENRvjAMES / 851

What is the point of the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its
almost vibratory disappearance according to the action of the word, however,
if it is not so that there emanates from it, without the predicament posed by
a ncar or concrete reminder, the pure notion.
1. say: a flower! And from the oblivion to which my voice relegates all
contours, as something other than the unmentioned calyces, musically
arises, the idea itself, and sweet, the flower absent from all bouquets. 7
Contrary to the facile numerical and representative functions, as the
crowd first treats it, speech which is above all dream and song, finds again
in the Poet, by a necessity that is part of an art consecrated to fictions, its
virtuality.
The line of several words which recreates a total word, new, unknown to
the language and as if incantatory, achieves that isolation of speech: denying,
in a sovereign gesture, the arbitrariness that clings to words despite the arti-
fice of their being alternately plunged in meaning and sound, and causes you
that surprise at not having heard before a cer,tain ordinary fragment of
speech, at the same time as the memory of the named object bathes in a
new atmosphere.
1896

7, In the original, the sentence cl1ds "l'ubsente de onstrates more forcefuIly that a name Indicates the
(OllS b()uquets" (the absent of all bouquets). By absence of the thing named.
omitting the word "flower," the French dem-

HENRY JAMES
1843-1916

Born in New York City, Henry James typically is placed in anthologies of American
literature, but he was in truth a cosmopolitan novelist and critic who sought to make'
his mark on the American, English, and European literary scenes. 'We can deal freely
with forms of civilization not our own," he affirmed in a letter in 1867, "can pick and
choosc and assimilate and in short (aesthetically) claim our property wherever wd'" .
find it." He wished to bring about "a vast intellectual fusion and synthesis of the
various National tendencies of the world"; his concern with the complex challenges
and \'cwards of the "art of fiction" was general, not limited to American fiction alone.
Henry James Sr., a religious philosopher and visionary, believed that his five chil-
dren should be educated with as few restrictions as possible; hence he had taken
them to Europe in 1855 for a three-year acquisition of a "sensuous education."
Theaters, art galleries, muscums, monuments, and landscapes were his favored sites
for learning. Among the gifted members of this family was William james, Henry's
cider hrother, a professor of philosophy and then psychology at Harvard whose influ-
ential books include The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Pragmatism
(I907). During the late 18605 and early 1870s, Henry james lived abroad much of
the time; in 1876 he decided to reside in London and frequently visit the Continent,
especially Rome and Paris,
James was an explorer of, and mediator between, cultures. One of his best early
stories, CIA Passionate Pilgrim" (1871), deals with the social and cultural challenges
faced by an American visitor to Europe. He developed this theme of cultural inter-
animation and difference in travel writings, such as Transatlantic Sketches (1875),