Volume 36, Number 17 · November 9, 1989
Prince of Poets
By Julian Barnes
Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé
edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd
University of Chicago Press, 238 pp., $27.50
In 1896, on the death of Verlaine, Mallarmé was elected Prince of Poets by the review La Plume. He accepted the honor but declined the dinner. It was, at this moment of public triumph, an entirely typical gesture. In part it reflected his finely calibrated sense of propriety—the death of a great poet should not be even the indirect cause of celebration—but it also had a wider, longer echo. Mallarmé had spent all his life Refusing the Banquet.
Review, 3967 words
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