French poet. A leader of the Symbolist school, he became known
as a poet's poet for his condensed, hermetic verse and
unorthodox syntax, reaching for the ideal world of the
intellect. His belief that poetry should be evocative and
suggestive was reflected in L'Après-midi d'un faune/Afternoon of
a Faun (1876; illustrated by Manet), which inspired the composer
Debussy. Later works are Poésies complètes/Complete Poems
(1887), Vers et prose/Verse and Prose (1893), and the prose
Divagations/Digressions After 1863 he composed mindfully and
looked for the ideal essence of things beyond everyday reality,
a movement symbolized by the heroine of the poem Hérodiade 1864
and the satyr of L'Après-midi d'un faune (first composed 1865)
and their attitudes of withdrawal and refusal. Mallarmé's
important poems do not progress by images or by plot and
narrative; instead they are self-contained verbal artifacts
built around a central object (a room, a chair, stars), symbol,
or idea. He devoted his life to the creation of a lang