Illuminations: Prose poems

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.They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse.Mrs. Varèse first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946.Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations.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.Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses.Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one.Yet he had already produced some of the finest exam