Stephane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 –1898), born Étienne Mallarmé, was a major French symbolist poet and critic. His work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. One of Mallarmé‘s best known poems, “L’Aprés Midi D’un Faun” (The Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by Edouard Manet. Among his other works are Hérodiade (1896) and Toast Funèbre (A Funeral Toast), which was written in memory of the author Théopile Gautier. Mallarmé‘s later works include the experimental poem Un Coup de Dés (1914), published posthumously. Mallarmé held Tuesday evening salons at his home on the Rue de Rome in Paris, and these gatherings became a hub of Parisian intellectual life, attracting the likes of writers André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.B. Yeats, the painters Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler, and the sculptor Rodin, among others. Those who attended became known as Les Mardistes, derived from the French word for Tuesday.