Child, Artist, “Genie” Self-portraits of the poet in Illuminations

Although the poems of Illuminations are essentially impersonal, fragments and refractions of autobiographical elements nevertheless make themselves felt. This article examines the self-representation of the prose poet Rimbaud from three perspectives: the sensibility of the child that emerges from the personal past to participate in the formation of a poetic world that is open to the fabulous; the artist who was in his time plagued by the tension between pride and public indifference; and the figure of the “genie,” who is both the emblem of immanent transcendence and that of the ideal poet projected into the future.