Jean-Claude Milner's 1999 book Mallarmé au tombeau was no doubt meant to explode like a well-placed bomb in the midst of the poet's political reception, so destructive are its claims for the interpretative tradition we have studied so far in this book. Yet almost a decade after its publication Milner's short monograph remains all but ignored by scholars. When they have attended to Milner's book at all, scholars have dismissed it as a hasty and far-from-disinterested extrapolation of the meaning of a single sonnet, ‘The virginal, enduring, beautiful today’, to the entirety of Mallarmé's œuvre. However, as we hope to show in this short chapter, the significance of Milner's Mallarmé au tombeau extends well beyond Mallarmé's famous swan sonnet. In fact, it extends beyond Mallarmé's œuvre itself and strikes at the heart of the ‘political vision of the world’ (C 19–30) that has produced the figure of ‘comrade Mallarmé’. For Milner, Mallarmé was a resolutely counterrevolutionary figure who buried the Romantic tradition that had yoked literature to politics. Our task in this chapter will be to explore the details of Milner's reading – and thus allow, like a delayed explosion, the repercussions of Mallarmé au tombeau to begin to be felt.1

We can begin where Milner begins: with Mallarmé's sonnet ‘The virginal, enduring, beautiful today’, one of the best-known poems in his œuvre:

In his comments on the sonnet's publication history, Milner remarks that its date of composition might well have been any time during the decade 1865–75 – over ten years before its appearance in La Revue indépendante in 1885 (MT 11).