Correspondences The color of vowels in Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Rimbaud, and Banville

In his 1991 reading of “Voyelles,” Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that the colored timbres of the sonnet’s vowels deliberately oppose the colors they are assigned. Investigating whether Rimbaud’s œuvre supports the assumption that Rimbaud conceived of vowel timbres as colored, this article finds that “Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos de fleurs” might well do so, and that “Voyelles” might thus form part of Rimbaud’s debate on rhyme with Théodore de Banville.