‘Une heureuse trouvaille avec quoi paraît à peu près close la recherche d'hier, aura été le vers libre, modulation (dis-je souvent) individuelle, parce que toute âme est un nœud rythmique’. In expressing the view, in ‘La Musique et les lettres’ (1894), that free verse was, as it were, specially designed to release each poet's unique ‘chant profond’, Mallarmé was thoroughly in line with the thinking of his contemporaries. Far from the poem's releasing a rhythmic structure set somewhere beyond language, and beyond the poet, as a constellation of meaning to be achieved through strenuous reflection, through supplementation of the text by blank space, as in the Mallarméan enterprise, rhythm was, in free verse, to be a direct outcrop of the poet and indistinguishable from any other aspect of his utterance; Gustave Kahn tells us, in his ‘Préface sur le vers libre’ (1897): ‘Depuis longtemps je cherchais à trouver en moi un rythme personnel suffisant pour interpréter mes lyrismes avec l'allure et l'accent que je leur jugeais indispensables’. The verslibristes of the late nineteenth century envisaged a verse in which every modulation in the poet's psychic and organic condition, every creative impulse, conscious and unconscious, by definition unique and unrepeatable, would find its corresponding realisation in a perfectly adapted line of verse, itself necessarily unique and unrepeatable.