“So what makes Un Coup de dés so challenging and so groundbreaking? If 21st-century readers have trouble seeing the poem’s shape on the page as risky or radical, it’s largely because this work paved the way for so much of the 20th century’s experimentation. Its unprecedented use of white space to configure the reader’s visual experience resulted in what Mallarmé, in his Preface — though he cheekily tells us not to read it, or to forget if we did — called “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.” Lines of text, read from the upper left, across the book’s seam, to the lower right, “sometimes accelerate and slow the movement, articulating it, even intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page.” Those capitalized words — Idea and Page, as well as the grand Work or Book that occupied and eluded Mallarmé his entire life — represent important archetypes for the father of Symbolism. What that “Idea” is — not to mention its inextricable relationship to the “Page” and the unrealizable nature of the “Book” — has occupied and eluded readers for over a century. The notorious obscurity of even Mallarmé’s short lyrics (epitomized by the famously impenetrable “Sonnet in –yx,” where a key term on which comprehension might hinge is the nonce word ptyx) baffled Mallarmé’s publishers and continues to challenge contemporary critics.”
“The most influential analysis of the poem in English remains Robert Greer Cohn’s 1946 Yale dissertation, Un Coup de dés: An exegesis, which is cited by most of the critics who followed him, including Fowlie and Derrida. And though it continues to inform Mallarmé scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, even Cohn’s indispensable work cannot illuminate all the poem’s dark corners.”
“To those who may object that such an approach might make the poem too accessible, there’s little danger of that. Cohn himself called it “one of the most indecipherable pieces of writing in any literature,” so a little clarity can’t hurt.”