An examination of the use of names and the art of naming in the works of Stephane Mallarme. Maintaining an independent critical, and self-critical, approach, the author elaborates a 'theory of the name' from within the Mallarmean text, rather than through the application of an external theory. The work provides the reader with new ways of thinking about Mallarme's 'development' and about poetry's attempt to break out of an embattled position in the last decades of the nineteenth century.