“Entends comme brame” or an Aesthetics of the Vague

This article proposes a new reading of the obscure poem “Entends comme brame”. The complexity of the text may be explained by what we call here an ‘aesthetics of the vague’ which consists in the stylistic transposition of the evocation of a nebulous atmosphere. Our analysis clarifies the lexical and grammatical ambiguities, decodes the hermetic tropes and identifies the intertextual references. Caricaturing the clichés of romantic description, Rimbaud’s poem renews the genre by a radical disorganization.