This book proposes new meanings in Mallarmé's poetry and seeks to promote the development of his poetic art as a successful search for linguistic and textual mastery. This development is systematically traced from Mallarmé's earliest verse through to ‘Un coup de Des’, the radically innovative poem that was about to be published in a fine-art edition at the time of his untimely death in 1898. In a series of close readings, the book examines Mallarmé's poetic output up to and including the central ‘Sonnet en yx’, which is discussed both in its earliest version and within the context of ‘Plusieur ... More

This book proposes new meanings in Mallarmé's poetry and seeks to promote the development of his poetic art as a successful search for linguistic and textual mastery. This development is systematically traced from Mallarmé's earliest verse through to ‘Un coup de Des’, the radically innovative poem that was about to be published in a fine-art edition at the time of his untimely death in 1898. In a series of close readings, the book examines Mallarmé's poetic output up to and including the central ‘Sonnet en yx’, which is discussed both in its earliest version and within the context of ‘Plusieurs sonnets’. These readings are followed by analyses of other major sonnets, of ‘Prose (pour des Esseintes)’, and of ‘Un coup de Des’ itself. The ‘profound calculation’ on which Mallarmé claimed to have based this seemingly random text is here unfolded in all its structural and semantic complexity.