Reading Order
Poésies (Rimbaud)Poésies Reading Order
Poésies (1895) by Arthur Rimbaud collects the verse poems of 1870-72 that preceded the prose poetry of the Illuminations and Une saison en enfer — a body of work written in roughly two years by a poet between the ages of fifteen and seventeen that moves from highly accomplished Parnassian exercises through the violence and wit of the Commune period to the hallucinatory proto-Symbolist breakthrough of 'Le Bateau ivre' and the 'Voyelles' sonnet. The Poésies were not published as a collection in Rimbaud's lifetime (he circulated the poems in manuscript among Paris literary circles) but were assembled posthumously, first in 1895 and then in successive editions. They remain one of the most astonishing concentrated bursts of poetic development in literary history: within two years, Rimbaud went from imitating Ronsard and Gautier to inventing a mode of poetry that would not be fully understood or imitated until the twentieth century.
Where to start
Begin with 'Le Bateau ivre' (The Drunken Boat, 1871 — the poem Rimbaud brought to Paris to present to Verlaine and the literary world, a hundred-line voyage of hallucinatory imagery that announces everything to come), then 'Voyelles' (the famous sonnet assigning colors to vowels), then 'Ma Bohème' (the autobiographical adolescent wanderer poem). Then try the earlier Parnassian poems ('Sensation,' 'Roman') to understand where he started.
Complete Poésies (Rimbaud) Book List
- 1Buy
Le Bateau ivre (1871)
Arthur Rimbaud·1871·The great breakthrough poem, written in September 1871 for Rimbaud's arrival in Paris — a hundred quatrains of expanding hallucinatory voyage imagery that represents the most ambitious thing he had yet attempted. Available in all major editions and online. - 2Buy
Cahiers de Douai (1870)
Arthur Rimbaud·1870·The earliest surviving manuscripts — the two exercise books sent to Izambard in 1870 and Demeny in 1870, containing the very first poems; available in the Pléiade edition and showing the astonishing precocity of the fifteen-year-old poet. - 3Buy
Poésies complètes
Arthur Rimbaud·1895·The standard collected verse poems, most conveniently read in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes or the GF Flammarion edition with notes; available in dozens of editions and translations. - 4Buy
Illuminations (1886)
Arthur Rimbaud·1886·The prose poems that succeed the verse poems — reading the Poésies first shows the extraordinary development from formal verse to prose-poem imagery in the space of two years. - 5Buy
Rimbaud Complete Works (Paul Schmidt translation)
Arthur Rimbaud, trans. Paul Schmidt·1975·A highly readable American translation of all the major works with a biographical introduction; useful for readers coming to Rimbaud for the first time in English.
Poésies (Rimbaud) — Frequently Asked Questions
What is 'Le Bateau ivre' about?
'Le Bateau ivre' (The Drunken Boat, 1871) is a hundred-line poem in twenty-five quatrains in the voice of a boat that has been untethered from its hawsers (the 'haulers' at the start of the poem are either human or river-demons who have been killed) and has voyaged across an oceanic hallucination — an impossible sea of luminous imagery that expands through the poem into visionary excess before the boat, exhausted, wishes it could return to the puddles of childhood. It is an allegory of the visionary poet in the Romantic tradition (compare Shelley's 'Alastor'), but also a genuine breakthrough in imagistic density — the poem generates imagery at a rate and with an intensity that had simply not been done in French before.
What does the sonnet 'Voyelles' mean?
'Voyelles' (Vowels, 1871) is a sonnet that assigns colors to the five French vowels: 'A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu.' Much critical ink has been spilled on what Rimbaud meant, but the poem resists systematic interpretation. The most persuasive reading is that it is an exercise in synesthesia — the crossing of sensory registers that was central to the voyant program — and a display of the arbitrary power of the poet to create correspondences where none objectively exist. The final line ('O, l'Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux') shifts into a mystical register and remains deliberately obscure.
How old was Rimbaud when he wrote his major verse poems?
Rimbaud was fifteen when he wrote the first surviving poems (the Cahiers de Douai notebooks, 1870); sixteen when he ran away to Paris and wrote the insurgent Commune poems; seventeen when he wrote 'Le Bateau ivre,' 'Voyelles,' and the other major verse poems. He wrote Une saison en enfer at eighteen-nineteen and most of the Illuminations at approximately the same age. He had essentially stopped writing by twenty, and was completely done by twenty-one. The sheer speed of the development and the early abandonment remain among the most extraordinary facts in literary history.
What is the 'voyant' theory that Rimbaud outlines in his letters?
In two letters of May 1871 — to his former teacher Izambard and to the poet Paul Demeny — Rimbaud outlines a theory of the poet as 'voyant' (seer): the poet must make himself a seer by 'the long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses,' including all forms of love, suffering, and madness. The aim is to reach the unknown and to render it in language. Rimbaud explicitly repudiates Romanticism (Musset is a 'seventeenth-rate Racine') and claims that truly new poetry must leave the 'I' behind — 'Je est un autre' (I is someone else). The voyant theory is the philosophical framework for both the Illuminations and the early verse poems.
Where can I read Rimbaud in good English translation?
The best English translations are: Wallace Fowlie's bilingual Complete Works (University of Chicago Press, 1966) — scholarly, accurate, useful notes; Paul Schmidt's Complete Works (Harper & Row, 1975) — more idiomatic, good for first-time readers; John Ashbery's Illuminations (W.W. Norton, 2011) — the best translation of the Illuminations specifically, by a poet who shares Rimbaud's surrealist sensibility; and Oliver Bernard's Collected Poems (Penguin, 1962) — a readable bilingual edition. No single translation is authoritative for all the works, so comparing translations is useful for the major poems.
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