One could say that Mallarmé is the most ‘spiritualized’ French poet of the nineteenth century, the one with the most sacred view of the poetic art. His work takes to their most absolute and purified conclusion the implications of Baudelaire's idea of correspondences: the belief that behind the phenomena of the material world lies an anterior, immutable Reality; that material forms, imprisoned in the plane of the contingent and the accidental, testify nevertheless to a pattern of meaning and a mysterious order beyond themselves; and that an essential link exists between the artistic intuition, with its deep captures in the realm of aesthetic analogy, and the underlying unity of Creation. Poetry thus becomes, for Mallarmé, a religious act. From the insignificant body of things and from the base matter of human experience (mere sense-perceptions and personal emotions), he tries to disengage or resurrect the spirituality, the suggestive aura.

This means that Mallarmé's is a nebulous and obscure poetry. It makes no concessions to the idea of l'art pour tous and appeals unashamedly to those rarer spirits who are willing to turn themselves into initiates and whose imaginations find sustenance in an ethereal zone. As he says, ‘Toute chose sacrée et qui veut demeurer sacrée s'enveloppe de mystère’. But whereas the quotation might suggest an artificial cultivation of mystery for mystery's sake, his poetry is, in fact, only inaccessible in that it is trying to evoke what may well be a ‘sublime illusion’ and to release from the page what cannot be grasped in words.