Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé, born Étienne Mallarmé on 18 March 1842 and dead on 9 September 1898, was a French poet and critic and one of the major figures of French Symbolism. His dense, allusive and carefully constructed verse made him a model for younger writers, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early twentieth century, among them Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism. He is remembered as a poet who treated the page and the arrangement of language as part of meaning, and as a critic whose ideas about suggestion over statement shaped the Symbolist movement. This entry rests on the lead of a single encyclopedia article and can be deepened with his individual poems.