Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics

The scope of Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics is even broader than the title suggests: not only does Aimee Israel-Pelletier demonstrate Rimbaud's affinities with Impressionism, but she also relates him to realism and to the cultural and political climate of late nineteenth-century France, a watershed period in the history of vision and poetry; not only does she deal with Rimbaud's poetics, his theories of vision, but she also reinforces her compelling argument with ample discussion of his poems. Indeed, these incisive analyses illustrate the interaction of the visual and verbal languages at the most basic level, making her book at once comprehensive and concrete. Her argument is consistently lucid and uncluttered, her style straight-forward and jargon-free, resulting in a book that will prove attractive to experts in all of the many fields with which it intersects, yet accessible to the general reading public. In short, this fascinating study is also a great read. William J. Berg, University of Wisconsin-Madison