Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé taught English badly for thirty years and changed what a poem could be on Tuesday evenings. He was orphaned of his mother at five and his sister at fifteen, took a teaching qualification in English chiefly to have an income, and spent his career in provincial lycées and then in Paris being reported for poor discipline. The salon is half the story. From 1880 he received on Tuesdays in the rue de Rome, and Valéry, Gide, Yeats, Verlaine, Debussy, Whistler, Degas and Renoir came; when Berthe Morisot died she left her daughter in his care and Renoir's. The poetry is deliberately difficult and was meant to be. His argument was that naming a thing destroys three quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in guessing it - so the work suggests, and syntax is twisted until the sentence has to be reassembled by the reader. L'Après-midi d'un faune took him ten years and became Debussy's prelude, which is how most people have met it. Un coup de dés in 1897 abandoned the line altogether: words scattered across a double-page spread in different sizes, with the blank paper part of the reading. It is the ancestor of a century of typographic experiment. He worked for years towards a total Book that would contain everything and never came near it. He died at fifty-six of a throat spasm, having asked the day before that his notes be burned because there was no literary inheritance in them. His family did not entirely obey, which is how the plans for the Book survive.

• Lived: 1842 CE – 1898 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: poet