Sospeso presents Pierre Boulez's Mallarmé cycle at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on May 10, 2004.

The work of the great French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé has often been considered the best example of "pure poetry." Mallarmé dealt in metaphorical obliquities and attempted to practice alchemy with words - to create a kind of poetry where the word as symbol would have a new mobility and would achieve new intensities and refinements of meaning. Roger Fry wrote of Mallarmé that "certainly no poet has set words with greater art in their surroundings, or given them by their setting, a more sudden and unexpected evocative power" and that "for him it was essential to bring out all the cross-correspondences and interpenetrations of the verbal images."

Mallarme's influence on modern poetry, in English as well as in French, has been great and pervasive. Such a poet as Wallace Stevens owes much to Mallarmé, and it is Mallarmé whom T. S. Eliot paraphrases in Little Gidding of his Four Quartets. Mallarmé's influence is visible in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Debussy's tone poem The Afternoon of a Faun, and the ballet immortalized by Nijinski, are based on a famous poem of Mallarmé, while the visual pattern of his poem A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance foreshadowed the typographical experimentation of contemporary poetry. Certain of Mallarmé's aesthetic theories parallel those of the abstract painters of today, while his poetical syntax was compared by Roger Fry to the technique of the Cubists.

From the introductory front flap of the 1951 edition published by New Directions of Mallarmé's poems as translated by Roger Fry.