The symbolist movement may be described as the effort to bring poetry to the condition of music. The theory of the suggestiveness of words comes from a belief that a primitive language, half-forgotten, half-living, exists in each man. It is language possessing extraordinary affinities with music and dreams.

Words for Mallarme were then much more than signs. Used evocatively and realistically, they are the means by which we are inducted into an ideal world. “Poetry is”, as Mallarme defined it in 1886, “the expression by means of human language restored to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious sense of the aspects of existence: it endows our sojourn with authenticity and constitutes the sole spiritual task.”