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Illuminations (poems)
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Illuminations (French Les Illuminations) is the title presumably given by Paul Verlaine to a collection of unpublished poems written in manuscript by Arthur Rimbaud. The first known use of the title Les Illuminations is in a letter Verlaine wrote to his brother-in-law Charles de Sivry in 1878.
The manuscripts of some prose fragments and some verses were delivered by Charles de Sivry in 1885 in a bundle to Gustave Kahn, to be printed in Kahn's magazine La Vogue.
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Illuminations (French Les Illuminations) is the title presumably given by Paul Verlaine to a collection of unpublished poems written in manuscript by Arthur Rimbaud. The first known use of the title Les Illuminations is in a letter Verlaine wrote to his brother-in-law Charles de Sivry in 1878.
The manuscripts of some prose fragments and some verses were delivered by Charles de Sivry in 1885 in a bundle to Gustave Kahn, to be printed in Kahn's magazine La Vogue. This bundle presumably contained forty-eight poems in prose (prose poems) and verse, because that is what La Vogue subsequently published in 1886. They gave the forty-eight poems the general title Les Illuminations, since this was a title Verlaine had once given to some of Rimbaud's "prose fragments". It is unclear whether all the poems included in the bundle---verse as well as prose---were included in what Verlaine previously referred to as Les Illuminations, Verlaine was never clear on the subject---or whether poems not originally included as Illuminations were incorrectly published under that general title. It is also unclear whether Rimbaud ever used such a title for any collection of his poems, or whether Verlaine originated the title.
The bundle was edited for La Vogue by the poet Felix Feneon, who described it later thus: "The manuscript I was given was a bundle of sheets of the kind of ruled paper you find in school notebooks. Loose pages, without page numbers, a pack of cards---otherwise why would I have thought of arranging them in some kind of order, as I remember doing?".
Paul Schmidt, Suzanne Bernard and Enid Starkie state that the prose poems usually called Illuminations were written over a period of time that may well have begun before July of 1872 and may possibly have continued until 1875, or perhaps even after that.
The Illuminations include some autobiographical allusions to his voyant (visionary) period, which began in 1869; but Illuminations is neither a confession nor an apology. Its several dozen short prose works and two free-verse poems transcend prose grammar by allowing their words to drift away from their dictionary definitions.
The English composer Benjamin Britten wrote a song cycle based on these poems.
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