This book after all might be the most decisive one in my formation: Robert Greer Cohn's Toward the Poems of Mallarmé. On re-reading it once again I notice this passage he writes on Jean-Pierre Richard's majestic L'Univers imaginaire, and I like it very much. With due respect to Richard, undoubtedly one of the most important literary critics ever, he writes:
Richard's volume is remarkable, but chiefly, as we have come to expect of him, as a study of the man (a sort of inner biography) or, rather, of the "everypoet" in Mallarmé. This is scientific and general pre-criticism, or aesthetics, rather than criticism and does not rise to the full specificity of the individual works. How often an image pinned down by a dozen quotations will change under the impact of neighboring images in a given poem! But, while much space is alloted to juvenilia or repetitious documentation, the poems themselves receive a few lines (or, at most, a couple of pages) each. Richard chooses to ignore, for practical purposes, Mallarmé's biggest single effort at a poetic work, the Coup de Dés. In this way, he, Richard--as he candidly admits to be his aim--becomes the owner of the ambitious syntactical or "totalizing" vision which is properly Mallarmé's. God protect us from our friends!
Rober Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (1965)
Touché, for the "inner biography" part. And the final sentence is GREAT. Thematism has its own metaphysics. Criticism, in the final instance, should be practical criticism. And criticism is neither biography nor some para-philosophical murmuring. Yet IN PRACTICE we can't help but ending up in syncretism, can we?
