3
" I have nothing to do with the poet: perjure your verse, it is gifted with only a feeble outer power. You preferred to feed the remainder of intrigues entrusted to the individual. Why should I make it clear for you, child, you know it just as I do, retaining no notion of it except by some quality or lack which is childhood’s alone; this point, that everything, whether vehicle or investment, now offered to the ideal, is contrary to it—almost a speculation on your modesty, for your silence—or it is defective, not direct and legitimate in the sense that impulse required just now, and it is tainted. "
― Stéphane Mallarmé , Selected Poetry and Prose
5
" The writer must make himself, in the text, the spiritual actor either of his sufferings, those dragons he has nurtured, or of some happiness. Floor, lamp, clouding of cloths and melting of mirrors, real even down to the exaggerated jerking of our gauzy form around the virile stature stopped upon one foot; a Place comes forth, a stage, the public enhancement of the spectacle of Self; there, through the mediation of light, flesh, and laughter, the sacrifice of personality made by the inspirer is complete; or else in some foreign resurrection, he is finished: his word from then on, reverberating and useless, is exhaled by the orchestral chimera. "
― Stéphane Mallarmé , Selected Poetry and Prose
6
" WHEN SHADOW THREATENED WITH THE FATAL LAW…” When shadow threatened with the fatal law One old Dream, desire and pain of my spine, Grieved at perishing beneath ceilings funereal, It folded its indubitable wing within me. Luxury, O ebony room where, to charm a king, Celebrated garlands writhe in their death, You are but a proud lie spoken by darkness In the eyes of the lone man dazzled by his faith. Yes, I know that, far in deep night, the Earth Casts with great brilliance the strange mystery Under the hideous centuries that darken it less. Space ever alike if it grow or deny itself Rolls in that boredom vile fires as witnesses That genius has been lit with a festive star. "
― Stéphane Mallarmé , Selected Poetry and Prose
8
" We have, in other words, a “daily paper.” But who, then, can make the gradual discovery of the meaning of this format, or even of a sort of popular fairyland charm about it? Then again, the leader, which is the most important part, makes its great free way through a thousand obstacles and finally reaches a state of disinterestedness. But what is the result of this victory? It overthrows the advertisement (which is Original Slavery) and, as if it were itself the powered printing press, drives it far back beyond intervening articles onto the fourth page and leaves it there in a mass of incoherent and inarticulate cries. "
― Stéphane Mallarmé , Selected Poetry and Prose