Étienne Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) supported himself as an unassuming English teacher in Paris while serving as the supreme intellectual lighthouse of European avant-garde literature. At his modest apartment on the Rue de Rome, his Tuesday evening salons (*Les Mardis*) became sacred pilgrimages for artists and writers, including André Gide, Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Edvard Munch.

Mallarmé sought to purify the language of the tribe (*donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu*), creating poetry of supreme hermetic density where silence, white space on the page, and musical suggestion took precedence over explicit description. His pagan pastoral poem L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876) inspired Claude Debussy's revolutionary orchestral prelude and Vaslav Nijinsky's ballet. His 1897 typographic tour de force, Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, founded modern concrete and visual poetry.