One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern - Hardcover

"There is only one poet capable of capturing the infinite in such a small space, and, we can now add, only one critic capable of capturing the mind-altering qualities of Stephane Mallarme's 1897 poem, "One Toss of the Dice." That a family man, a high school English teacher, and a follower of fashion could have unleashed the potential of the World Wide Web over a century ago is among the many revelations in R. Howard Bloch's astonishing book." -- Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French "A vivid evocation, at moments hilarious and at others poignant, of the astonishing world that gathered around the poet Stephane Mallarme...And at the center, gathering moment as the story unfolds, is Mallarme's creation of his supremely radical poem." -- Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve "This was the poem that, in the 1920s, long after Mallarme's apparently obscure death, compelled T. S. Eliot to recognize that 'every battle this French poet fought with syntax represents the effort to transmit lead into gold, ordinary language into poetry.' And the rest of Mr. Bloch's beautifully clear book explains How a Poem Made Us Modern." -- Richard Howard, author of A Progressive Education "A tour de force by a brilliant scholar dedicated to the most mysterious of poets." -- Arthur Goldhammer, translator of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

The forerunner of our digital age, a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backwards and forwards, even sideways, launched modernism. Stephane Mallarme's "One Toss of the Dice" has for over a century tantalised everyone from physicists to composers to graphic artists. R. Howard Bloch decodes the poem still considered among the most enigmatic ever written. Creating a shimmering portrait of Belle-epoque Paris with a cast of exotic characters-Napoleon III, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot, even an expatriate American dentist, Bloch positions Mallarme as the spiritual giant of late-nineteenth-century France. Featuring a new translation of the poem by J.D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a masterpiece shaped our perceptual world.