Illuminations

The test is subtractive, and it has to be put twice: to the pieces and to the book. Within the pieces it finds almost nothing to remove. “Départ” is four short lines and every one is required, from its opening “Assez vu.”, seen enough. “Aube” runs from its first sentence, the summer dawn embraced, through the chase of the goddess to the fall at waking, and no clause is idle. Put to the book, the test returns another answer. Rimbaud set no order; the sequence every reader meets is an editor’s, and the book could lose “Ouvriers”, “Fête d’hiver”, “Bottom” or “H” with its argument intact. The pieces are compelled; their gathering is permitted. The cap is met with room, and the axis is held where it is because it judges the unit, and the unit was assembled by other hands.

Score: 8.0 / 10

What the book brings into the open can in part be stated. The self is not given but made, by derangement and by vision, and once made it outruns the world it sees: “Barbare” raises its flag of bleeding meat over arctic flowers and adds “(elles n’existent pas.)”, they do not exist. The modern city is disclosed as spectacle and hallucination, in the metropolis of chalets, crystal and Alpine bridges of “Villes”. “Démocratie” puts the colonial army’s voice in its own mouth, conscripts bound for “pays poivrés et détrempés”, peppered and sodden countries, and that disclosure of a social condition holds. “Solde” puts the visionary’s own goods up for sale. But much of the book’s power is the rendering of a state, and a mood ranks below a meaning: “Génie” and “Conte” state, while many of the cityscapes dazzle without disclosing. The axis is held a tenth short of the summit’s bar.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Height and frequency both, and the frequency is the startling thing: almost every piece rises. “Aube” is transport itself, the goddess pursued through the city and wrapped in her veils at the edge of a wood. “Phrases” reaches it in one sentence, ropes stretched from steeple to steeple, garlands from window to window, “des chaînes d’or d’étoile à étoile, et je danse”, chains of gold from star to star, and I dance. “Mystique” tilts a whole landscape into a vision of angels and fires. “Barbare” is sublime of terror, its refrain the flag of bleeding meat over the silk of seas. “Génie” ends in adoration, and “Matinée d’ivresse” turns elevation dreadful. The height is cold and warm by turns and recurs on nearly every page. It is held below the top only because some of the cityscapes trade height for glitter.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Myth built, not only evoked, but built piece by piece. “Après le Déluge” rewrites the Flood: the world, washed clean, at once resumes its commerce and its butchery, and the speaker calls for a new deluge, so that the oldest story of renewal becomes a story of renewal refused. “Conte” is a fable of a Prince who kills his women and his court, meets a Genie who is himself, and dies with him. “Royauté” crowns a man and a woman for a morning. “Génie” makes a new divinity of love and of the present, a Christ without the Cross, and it bears load: it gathers the book’s appetite for a new love and a new harmony into one figure. What holds the axis below the top is that no single structure carries the myth across the book; the archetypes are built inside pieces and do not compose one mythic body.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, and behind it Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, together with the French alexandrine that Rimbaud had himself mastered by sixteen. The departure is total. Baudelaire’s prose poem keeps the anecdote, the moral and the stroller in the city street; Rimbaud drops all three: no narrator in a street, no story carried to its end, no lesson, only juxtaposed images whose syntax will not settle their relations. “Marine” and “Mouvement” break the line altogether, among the first French verse to do so. The stake was the whole of it. The work was written by a poet who then left poetry, given no order and no title of certain authorship, and left in the hands of others; it could have been lost, and it was published as the work of a man thought dead. Turn and stake are one fact here, and both stand at the edge of the scale.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. In verse, or in Baudelaire’s anecdotal prose poem, the visions would be framed: a speaker, a scene, a moral. The prose block without an anecdote lets images stand side by side with no logic but adjacency, and that is the knowledge: a perception in which the city, the dawn and the self arrive at once and are not ranked. “Enfance” uses numbered sections to break childhood into separate views that never become a memory. “Marine” makes the land and the sea one motion, in lines that run as waves, so that the form does what the poem says. Held below the top because the form of the book as a whole is the editors’ and is not an instrument: the living form is the piece, not the collection.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence first: a hundred and forty years of return, and the questions are not closed. The dating is still argued, and with it the meaning: whether the Illuminations are the work that came after the farewell of Une saison en enfer or the work that preceded it changes what the book is. “H”, “Being Beauteous”, “Dévotion” and “Génie” have carried rival readings, erotic, political, religious and autobiographical, for a century without one prevailing, and “Conte” is read in turn as a parable of the poet, of power and of desire. Symbolists, Claudel, the Surrealists and the New York poets have each found a different book in it. The formal depth matches: the syntax rewards return clause by clause. The figure stops short of the top because some of the yield is hermeticism rather than depth: a riddle can keep yielding because it is unsolved.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is French poetry of the nineteenth century and, by its reach, modern poetry in Europe and the Americas. The intrinsic force is very high. The book reorganised what a poem can be: a prose poem with no narrator and no anecdote, the image freed from discourse, and free verse in French. The reach was delayed: the book came to the field some fourteen years after it was written, and redirected it within a decade, and the delay is credited. A tenth is held back because much of the reach runs through the legend of the poet as well as through this book. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Gustave Kahn and the Symbolists of the vers libre took it up at once; Claudel credited Rimbaud with his conversion; the Surrealists made Rimbaud a precursor; Saint-John Perse and René Char wrote in its line; in English John Ashbery translated it and the New York poets read it as a source; and Benjamin Britten set pieces of it as Les Illuminations in 1939.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The span is about a hundred and forty years from publication. Form: the pieces survive in fair copies and are legible whole. The charge falls on the form of the book, whose order and boundaries are editorial, and on a few pieces whose fair copies, in the hand of Germain Nouveau, have had their attribution questioned, though the authorship of the pieces has held. Presence: continuous since 1886, taught wherever French poetry is taught, translated again and again into every major language, set to music and quoted. The surface is not fixed to its moment; the visions have outlived Symbolism. Fabric: nothing to charge. Presence would argue a tenth more; the editorial form of the book takes it back.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Rimbaud’s French. The command is of the sentence and its juxtapositions: long accumulative periods hung on semicolons, as in “Phrases”, set against blunt verbless notations, as in “Départ”; nouns piled without connectives so that the image does the work of syntax, as in “Barbare”; a vocabulary that runs from English words and technical terms to the liturgy. The rhythm of the prose is exact, and the free verse of “Marine” is measured so that its lines heave. Endings are placed with a lyric poet’s control: “Au réveil il était midi.”, on waking it was noon. The making is load-bearing in the strongest pieces. Held where it is because the pieces are uneven in finish, “Fête d’hiver” and “Ouvriers” slighter work, and because a few passages trade precision for glitter.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: “Aube”, the dawn embraced in a garden and pursued, and “Démocratie”, the conscripts’ brutal chorus. One law joins them: a consciousness that wills a new world and finds the old one in its mouth, and a syntax that sets images side by side without hierarchy. The voice of vision governs both. But the law is a voice and a method more than a structure. The book has no order of its own, its pieces were written over years whose span is uncertain, and its range runs from rapture to sarcasm to political ventriloquism without the book knowing how they relate. The range is wide, and range is credited; the coherence across it is held by the voice alone. The inner law is real at the level of the voice and loose at the level of the whole.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged as a book of prose poems, and as a short form. What it holds: consciousness, fully, as subject and as instrument; childhood, in “Enfance”; love and the erotic, in “Being Beauteous”, “H”, “Royauté” and “Génie”; the modern city and its industry, in “Villes”, “Ponts” and “Métropolitain”; labour, in “Ouvriers”; the state, empire and the army, in “Démocratie”; commerce, in “Solde”; the sacred, in “Après le Déluge”, “Mystique” and “Génie”; the natural order, in “Aube” and “Marine”. One visionary consciousness integrates them; they are not listed, and for a short form that is a real achievement. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the family and history as lived are thin, and that the orders are held in flashes rather than in a structure.

Score: 7.8 / 10