All the Great masters, ancient and modern, plagiarized Homer, and Homer plagiarized God.
~ Stéphane Mallarmé
One Toss of the Dice: The incredible story of how a poem made us modern by R. Howard Bloch is a biography of Mallarmé and his poem "One Toss of the Dice." The author makes the case that Mallarmé's experiments with syntax & layout are a forerunner of modern poetry, as well as cubism, hypertexts, Eliot & more. His "use of space and design to render meaning was an early version of Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum 'the medium is the message'." An attempt to "recover in time the fullness that is outside of time." Mallarmé "tried to raise a page to the power of the starry sky," Valéry said.