See http://www.studiocleo.com/librarie/mallarme/biography.html.
Mallarmé's task was to make sense of the marginalized status of poetry
in his time, as a cultural mission. Notice that he did not choose to
contest the mass media on their own ground (although he edited a fashion
magazine for awhile; it never mentioned literature) but rather, through
an intensive investigation of the nature of poetic language and of that
experience which poetic language articulates, to attain the full potential
of the linguistic artifices and departures from the vernacular which had
become part of poetic tradition since the Alexandrians (epitomized particularly
in Vergil's Aeneid), but which had seldom been the chief focus of previous
poetic endeavor.