The Prose Poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century.
These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up--now here, now there--unexplored aspects of experience and thought..
While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations--des vertiges, des silences, des nuits.
He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other Prose Poems are no less remarkable.
Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse.
Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one.
Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses.
This edition also contains two other series of Prose poems, which include two Poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varèse discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud\'s writing.
Since then she has revised her work and has included two Poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations.
Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud\'s Illuminations in 1946.
Mrs.
They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse.
The Prose Poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century
