Impressionism and the Prose Poem: Rimbaud’s Artful Authenticity

The new artists, the Impressionists avant la lettre, saw themselves first and foremost as avant-garde revolutionaries battling against conventional aesthetics which promoted the finished effect, the tableau, and rules of perspective. In contrast, modernists sought to loosen rigid forms and break up smooth surfaces as a way of evoking the liveliness, multiplicity and edginess of modern life. Impressionists exhibited an acute distaste for old forms. The prose poem was not an obscure genre when Rimbaud was writing the poems of the Illunimations. The Illuminations were, however, the most radical experiments in poetic prose of their time. They ushered in a distinctly different look and feel for poetic experience. The Illuminations, more than anything Baudelaire or Mallarmé had written, took Parisian literary circles by storm because it had radically altered the look of poetry beyond effacing line breaks, edge rhymes and meter, as had been done previously. In a more dramatic way, the Illuminations produced unexpected effects of spontaneity, strikingness and flatness, the very hallmarks of Impressionist aesthetics. As with Impressionist art, the prose poems of the Illuminations looked radically different and required they be addressed differently.