Imagination, intellect et espace dans le Coup de Dés de Mallarmé

For the last thirty years, critical studies of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés have been devoted mainly to the question of the relation between its spatial form and its content. Within this approach, most descriptions of its visual layout and its formal mechanisms remain excessively attached to the idea of mimesis – be it pictorial or ideographic – a trend encouraged by the poet himself in his letters and in the Cosmopolis edition. This article will attempt to bypass the constraints posed by the notion of imitation by considering the link between the poem’s form and its content as the correlation of two heterogeneous series of determinations. This conception of the poem, which brings its mise en page close to the definition of poetic verse, will also allow us to describe both the strict formal nature of the spatial layout and its apparent spontaneity and naturalness.