Literary Birthday – 18 March – Stéphane Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé was born 18 March 1842, and died 9 September 1898.

Seven Quotes

1. Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
2. To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.
3. It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
4. It is in front of paper that the artist creates himself.
5. I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty—and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
6. We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.
7. In reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a French poet and critic. His work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. A selection of his works is available in Collected Poems and Other Verse.

by Amanda Patterson

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