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Stéphane Mallarmé, 1891. (credit: Archives Photographiques, Paris)

(born March 18, 1842, Paris, France — died Sept. 9, 1898, Valvins, near Fontainbleau) French poet. With Paul Verlaine, he was a founder and leader of the Symbolist movement. A schoolteacher throughout his life, Mallarmé made steady progress in his parallel career as a poet. Perhaps partly owing to tragedies in his life, most of his verse expresses an intellectual longing to transcend reality and find refuge in an ideal world, as in the dramatic poems Hérodiade (1869) and L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876; "The Afternoon of a Faun"), which inspired Claude Debussy's famous prelude, and the typographically innovative Un Coup de dés (1897). After 1868 he devoted himself to writing complex, exquisitely wrought, and extraordinarily difficult poems about the nature of imagination itself. The poems were intended for what he called his Grand oeuvre, which he never completed.

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