Mallarmé: A Poet and his Critics

As Mallarmé's prestige reached its apogee among the creative elite toward the middle of this century, countless reputable critics continued to attack his work as "obscure," "precious," a "failure," and so on. The plausible historical reasons for this assault include the fact of the surfeit of riches offered by the Symbolist era generally in the arts naturally followed by a letdown and a justification for it. Something like Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" occurred, as evidenced by the new "dry" æsthetics of T. E. Hulme, Pound, and to some extent T. S. Eliot, in his earlier career. The traditional pragmatism of English criticism is also involved in this trend, represented latterly by men like Leavis and Patrick Donohugh in England, Yvor Winters in America. The nature of Mallarmé's major work was totally misunderstood, and he was altogether ill-served by the critical establishment. This is an old story as we know from Henri Peyre's monumental Writers and their Critics. (RGC)