Here we see a playful Mallarmé forging new linguistic relationships in order to establish connections between himself and others: he is a writer of rhymed addresses on letters to friends, a giver of fans and boxes of glacé fruit inscribed with verse. In a variation of ‘divine transposition’, occasions and objects become poetic acts, the quotidian becomes textual performance. Mallarmé’s range of verse form bears witness to this desire to build a bridge between the everyday and the absolute. He covers the spectrum: Petrarchan sonnets (two quatrains followed by two tercets), Shakespearean sonnets (three quatrains and one couplet; see for example ‘The hair flight of a flame . . .’), alexandrines (the standard French twelve-syllable line), octosyllables and hepta- syllables. Then there are the prose pieces and journal articles. Following the move, most prominent in Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, towards making the distinction between poetry and prose more fluid, Mallarmé wants to abolish the distinction altogether: ‘Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except in notices and on page four of the papers. In the genre called prose, there are verses [. . .] of all rhythms.

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