SOURCE: Little, Roger. “Rimbaud: The Shaping of a Vision.” In Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge, pp. 253-63. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Little examines formal patterns and the use of visual metaphors in Rimbaud's prose poetry.

Once it was clearly established, in the course of the nineteenth century, that the attribute of poetry was distinct from the technique of verse, it was possible for poets to allow the shaping of their texts to respond to visual stimuli, whether from the real world or from existing art works. Without going as far as Mallarmé in Un coup de Dés … or, later, Apollinaire in his Calligrammes, Rimbaud displays, in his use of prose for poetry in Illuminations for example, a concern for form no less responsive to his object than they, however...