Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/37

Rh Sarah Helen Whitman on April 4, 1876, Mallarmé says: "Whatever is done to honor the memory of a genius the most truly divine the world has seen, ought it not at first to obtain your sanction? Such of Poe's works as our great Baudelaire has left untranslated, that is to say, the poems and many of the critical fragments, I hope to make known to France." Mallarmé was a symbolist and the prince of symbolists. His motto was, "To name is to destroy, to suggest is to create." He was spokesman for the subconscious. Every clear idea, he thought, had long ago been expressed; what remained was to give utterance to the subliminal. Edmund Gosse said of him: "Language was given to Mallarmé to conceal definite thought, to draw the eye away from the object. He aims at illusion and wraps mystery around his simplest utterance." Mallarmé's passion for perfection, in other words, brought its own defeat; it splintered his effort into fragments, shining fragments but fragments none the less. In his quest for symbolism the word rather than the idea became the unit.

These qualities of style are necessarily kept in check to a degree in Mallarmé's prose versions of Poe's poems; but, with all their perfection of word equivalence, these rimeless and rhythmless lines, these stanzas that lack the old integrations, seem almost a parody to