The Afternoon of a Faun

by Pericles Lewis

The Afternoon of a Faun  (1876), by the leading symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, demonstrates the symbolists' concern with the invisible, and with those hermetic meanings available only to the poet or the skilled reader and the corresponding belief that poetry must be allusive, opaque, and difficult (the techniques of the French symbolists were decisive in Eliot’s later formulation of English modernist poetics). In the poem, Mallarmé compresses syntax and incorporates symbols with essentially private meanings, so that two readers of the poem might well disagree about what it meant. The symbolists also sought a mixing of the various senses—synesthesia—modeled on the aesthetic ideas of Baudelaire and of the composer Richard Wagner, theorist of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the total work of art. Thus The Afternoon of a Faun  would later inspire a modern ballet composed by Debussy and danced by Diaghilev and Nijinsky’s Ballets Russes.[1]


  1. ↑This page has been adapted from Pericles Lewis's Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2007), pp. 47, 49.

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