Stéphane Mallarmé Biography

Étienne Mallarmé, commonly known as Stéphane Mallarmé, was an eminent French poet and critic. He was one of the four major French poets, along with Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, who belonged to the latter half of the nineteenth century and led the famous Symbolist art movement. Several avant-garde artistic schools of the early twentieth century like Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism were directly inspired by his symbolist work. Having lost his family members one after the other very early in life, he developed a yearning to escape from the harsh realities of the world that had treated him so unkindly. Although he began his career as a school teacher and continued teaching till 1893, he took up a parallel career in writing poetry to get away from the cruel world of reality and to search for security in an ideal world. Some of his famous works are ‘L’Aprés Midi D’un Faun’, ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Toast Funèbre’. Although he was a celebrated poet throughout his life, much of his work remained unintelligible because of their complex sentence structure and vague lingo. Nevertheless, he remains one of the best writers of the latter half of the nineteenth century, making it a brilliant phase in French literature.