Abstract

Stéphane Mallarmé, though widely regarded as the most “modern” of all 19th century poets, is still driven by the romantic and Christian idea of a profound unity between matter and spirit, and the question of how to express this unity in words to overcome a merely materialist vision of the world, is essential to his work. As we shall see, the motif of the angel, the spiritual creature per se, is closely related to that idea.