It is the reading world's good fortune that St 00e9phane Mallarm 00e9's letters survived, allowing later generations an intimate look at the inner life of one of Europe's most important poets. Mallarm 00e9 (1842-98), often called the father of the Symbolists, has had an immense influence on the development of modern European poetry. It was his ambition to create a poetry pure of quotidian reality-autonomous, concentrated, linguistically inventive. His correspondence documents the evolution of this aim, the crafting of a poetics out of a life inescapably "real" in its pains and charms.