Mallarmé: `Je dis: un fleur!'

Examination of "Je dis: une fleur!" reveals that it is a highly human communication on the nature of poetic creation. Fleur is a figure that the reader particularizes, relating it to his sense of the scene through his psychological reaction to the colon and his appreciation of the exclamation point. The problem is one of spectacle – spectacle for the poet, for his reader-audience, and poet-reader exchange, a communication in the form of a dialogue that is fundamentally humanistic, dynamic, and concerned with the creation of presence. (VAL)