News at Eleven: A [Stéphane] Mallarmé poem is typically a soufflé

of synaesthetic delights, served up to all five senses with the icy skill of a Paris head waiter, crying out for orchestration by Debussy and illustrations by Manet. It will tend to strike a mystical note, as though spoken by the priest of a non-existent religion addressing an equally non-existent god. It will resist the intelligence almost as successfully as poems can, to abuse another line from Wallace Stevens.

from The Guardian: The Poems in Verse by Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson--review

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