St�phane Mallarm�, 1842 - 1898 French poet St�phane Mallarm� was born in Paris. His father and grandfather expected him to follow in the family tradition of French civil service but he didn't do well in school. Mallarm� began writing at a young age under the influence of Charles Baudelaire. After Mallarm� left school, he went to England and while there he got married. He was a schoolteacher from 1864 until his retirement in 1893. His first poems started appearing in magazines during the 1860's. He wrote his first important poem "L'Azur" and it was published when he was twenty-four years old. His most famous work is "L'Apres-Midi D'un Faune" (1865), and was inspired by Debussy's… tone poem of the same name (1894) and illustrated by the famous painter Manet. Some of his other notable works are "Herodiade" (1896), and "Toast Funebre," which was written in memory of the author Theopile Gautier. Mallarm� spent his life putting his literary theories into practice by writing his Grand oeuvre (Great Work). On September 9, 1898, Mallarme died without completing this work. His experimental poem "Un Coup De Des" was published posthumously in 1914.
The work of Yves Bonnefoy, a poet, critic, and translator, is philosophical in nature and difficult to penetrate. He has written meditations on the themes of the immobility of matter and the power of language. Influenced by such German philosophers as Hegel and Heidegger Bonnefoy reflects in his poetry a sense of tragic anguish, often through the use of understatement. Bonnefoy's principal poetic works include On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1953), a philosophical meditation on the value of language, and Words in Stone (1965). He has written essays on art history and poetry in L'Improbable and La Seconde Simplicite. As a translator, Bonnefoy is well known for his renderings of… Shakespeare into French including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, and A Winter's Tale.