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Stéphane Mallarmé is today considered one of France’s most important poets of the second half of the nineteenth century. Although he was known for the obscure imagery and difficult syntax of his verse, Mallarmé enjoyed the friendship of other modern thinkers, in particular, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Odilon Redon, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and James McNeill Whistler. Despite the fact that much of his poetry is unabashedly extreme and difficult to decipher, artists continue, to this day, to turn to his evocative verse for inspiration.