It is the reading world's good fortune that Stephane Mallarme's letters survived, allowing later generations an intimate look at the inner life of one of Europe's most important poets. Mallarme (1842-98), often called the father of the Symbolists, has had an immense influence on the development of modern European poetry. It was his ambition to create a poetry pure of quotidian reality autonomous, concentrated, linguistically inventive. His correspondence documents the evolution of this aim, the crafting of a poetics out of a life inescapably "real" in its pains and charms."