Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle
"Throughout her book Lloyd segues gracefully from the poet's life and milieu to his poems, always matched with her first-rate translations and subtle explications. While insisting on the everyday simplicity of Mallarme's symbols (mirrors, sunsets, vases) she never tries to explain away the poems' irreducible complexity. This is biographical criticism of the highest order; it is also an absorbing portrait of a dazzling subculture."—Chase Madar, Times Literary Supplement, 22 December 2000"The book places Mallarmé within the blazing late-19th-century Parisian artistic ferment and offers credible looks at the origins of his endlessly complicated and beautiful work."—Publishers Weekly, 6 December 1999"This articulate literary biography . . . sheds new and important light on Mallarmé's own poems and essays . . . An important addition to large public as well as scholarly collections . . . this volume will be a sine qua non for any library supporting serious study in poetry, art, and music of late 19th-century France. Endnotes, a substantial bibliography, a useful index, and excellent print, paper, and binding add to the book's value."—Choice, June 2000"An extremely thoughtful and well-documented new study, a book that sheds as much light on the cultural dynamics of the fin-de-siecle as it does on the aesthetics, ethics, and personality of Mallarmé himself. . . . In the end, Lloyd skillfully demonstrates that Mallarmé's correspondence holds much hidden significance."—Pamela A. Genova, French Forum, Winter 2001"Rosemary Lloyd's book stands out among recent publications on Mallarmé for its readability and its intimate portrait of the poet in the context of his times."—Dorothy Betz, The European Legacy"Lloyd's richly insightful study focuses on the way Mallarme's correspondence with his friends and acquaintances (his circle) sheds light on the process of poetic composition. . . . Lloyd's style is elegant rather than artful, and the erudition of the author, while understated, is apparent on every page."—Melanie Hawthorne, French Review"To encounter this remarkable study of Mallarmé's life, character, and surroundings with a focus on a broad exchange of letters is to read, for once, from the inside out. At every turn, Rosemary Lloyd's lively and authoritative translations, her deep knowledge, and subtle grasp of what really matters—in a life and in a reading—make this book a triumph."—Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, Graduate School, City University of New York, editor of Stéphane Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose"Taking the poet's correspondence as the focus of her study, Rosemary Lloyd brilliantly captures the savor of Mallarmé. Her delightful, finely drawn portrait illuminates Mallarmé's relationships with his many artist friends, from Zola to Redon."—James Lawler, University of Chicago"Unique among Mallarmé's biographers (in French or in English), Rosemary Lloyd has articulated the intricate structure of his procedures as the true poet of reading—his and ours. Not only a formidable achievement, but a mandatory one, putting us richly in her debt, and happy to be there."—Richard Howard"Rosemary Lloyd's Mallarmé occupies a peopled landscape rather than the desert of abstraction to which many recent critics have sought to confine him. But the remarkable thing about this book is that Lloyd's discussion of Mallarme's people—the crowd of artists and litterateurs with whom he had dealings—offers us new ways of reading his poems, essays, and letters at their most difficult and provocative. This is a landmark in the historical understanding of an incomparable writer."—Malcolm Bowie, Oxford University"Highly original in form and conception, Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle stands out from other biographies. Rosemary Lloyd demonstrates the central importance of the letters for Mallarmé's aesthetic theory and practice, and their critical interest as a testing ground for the great experiments of Symbolism."—Jill Anderson, University of Melbourne