MALLARMÉ

Lot 461
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1500 - 2000 EUR
MALLARMÉ
MALLARMED (Stéphane). Autograph letter signed, addressed to [Stuart Merrill]. S.l., May 8, 1887. 7 pages in-8 (very slight slits in the folds, small hole in the center without damage to the text). Nice answer to the young symbolist poet, author of the collection Les Gammes (Paris, Vanier, 1887), whose first and last pieces, La Flûte and Refrains mélancoliques, are dedicated to Mallarmé. He thanks him for his book: "They are more than Gammes allez! You've had your fingering for a long time and you find definitive chords. Perhaps, for the first time, I have come across a gifted collection of beginnings: almost no poem, put into a mature work, would bring dissonance to it, so much so that you are first of all a poet, intuitive and exact. I say this to you from the depths of my mind "[]. Delighted by the "subtle and fluid quality of the song [...] with its sudden richness", he quotes two verses that remain particularly in his mind, and he congratulates him for already being one of them, "which is the supreme art, to conceal the alliterative games, which too much seizable exteriority would betray even to the process, so that the miracle of the verse remains, for an instant, inexplicable. Go in that direction. Now, by what marvel, other than what my friend Ghil brings home every week and which makes you familiar (this is an analysis), have you managed to penetrate yourself to this point of all that a curious end of the century is trying to do here: I would be surprised if it were easy for me to understand that the essence of everything is perhaps received, volatile and purer, from afar. (S. Mallarmé, Correspondence, vol. III, no. DXLIII).
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