Mallarmé and Circumstance

Following his Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art, this book is the second in Roger Pearson's authoritative two-volume study of the work of Stéphanie Mallarmé (1842-1898), and the first comprehensive study of Mallarmé's 'poetry of circumstance' in any language. For Mallarmé, in a world without God, the role of the poet is to break the silence with language and to confer upon the contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and semantic pattern. Literature provides a 'translation of silence', 'intimate galas' in which the mysterious drama of the human condition is performed for and by the reader on the stage of the verse poem, the prose poem, and what Mallarmé calls the 'poëme critique'. In Part 1, Pearson examines the prose poems within the context of Mallarmé's writing about the theatre. In Part II, he focuses on the 'circumstanzas' - the famous 'Tombeaux', 'Hommages', 'Eventails', and 'vers de circonstance' - in which Mallarmé invests the quotidian with the 'glorious lie' of poetry. In a series of close readings Pearson demonstrates how complex poetic structures, and especially the sonnet, may serve to guide the human search for meaning and shape our anguish in a 'ceremony of the Book.'