Mallarmé and the Language of Ideas

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) marks the emergence of a new type of writing. A close reading of his great poem "Prose pour des Esseintes (1885) shows how Mallarmé is moving away from the language of philosophy, represented here by the word "Idées, and toward a new relationship between abstract ideas and poetic textures. The true excitement of Mallarmé's abstract ideas, and his originality, is inseparable from his verbal inventiveness and daring, which finds in poetic textures a new way of working with concepts. (HMW)