Segregation and Disintegration of an Image: Mallarmé's Struggle with the Angel

This study traces the trajectory of the symbolic image configuration of the Angel in Mallarmé's poetic universe. For the Angel, a conventional figure of the ideological and poetic tradition we share, demonstrates par excellence how the poet adopts a traditional image, as well as language, and finally explodes both. The image will lose its integrity while its fragments will survive as new nuclei of significance. The approach is diachronic, taking into account such formative influences as the poetry of Edgar A. Poe, as well as the very experience with that "foreign idiom;" and, the analysis yields a genealogy of the symbol in Mallarmé and its subsequent depletion and fragmentation, analogous to that of poetic language itself. (UF)