Patrick McGuinness

Stéphane Mallarmé

In October 1879 Stephane Mallarme's eight-year-old son Anatole died after several months of illness. Mallarme (1842-1898), the great poet of French Symbolism, heir of Baudelaire and one of the founders of modern poetry, made notes towards a poem that was to become the Tombeau d'Anatole - Anatole's Tomb. The poem was never written, and Mallarme makes no reference to the project in his correspondence. When they were first published in French in 1961, the notes revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarme, which even now disturbs the idea of the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. In the Tombeau d'Anatole he expresses his 'fury against the formless'; the consolations - and inconsolability - of bereavement.

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