Will new and alive the beautiful today Shatter with a blow of drunken wing This hard lake, forgotten, haunted under rime By the transparent glacier, … - Stéphane Mallarmé

formally propose now to examine the differences between this rag and the book, which is supreme. The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will. Now then — The foldings of a book, in comparison with the large-sized, open newspaper, have an almost religious significance. But an even greater significance lies in their thickness when they are piled together; for then they form a tomb in miniature for our souls. Every discovery made by printers has hitherto been absorbed in the most elementary fashion by the newspaper, and can be summed up in the word: Press. The result has been simply a plain sheet of paper upon which a flow of words is printed in the most unrefined manner.

It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contemplation of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle, Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three quarters of a poem's enjoyment-which is derived from unraveling it gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream. Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood; or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by a series of decipherings.)

The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.