One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (2016)

Praising Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (translated here as “One Toss of the Dice”) as “the birth certificate of modern poetry,” Bloch (A Needle in the Right Hand of God) meticulously reconstructs the events leading to its composition. He shows how the poem was a synthesis of the poet’s experiences and influences and an “enormous break with the conceptual world in place since the Renaissance” that anticipated developments in painting, music, and dance. Bloch’s analysis of the poem’s verbal and syntactical acrobatics and its resonance with later works is enlightening. For most readers, this book will be an engrossing introduction to a work of literature whose artistic significance the author makes seem inarguable.