ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates facets of Arthur Rimbaud's exploration of the expanding, mobile dimensions of modern urban space as a model for poetic structures within the prose poem. Like the prose poems of Le Spleen de Paris, those of Arthur Rimbaud's collection Illuminations consistently undermine their readers' attempts to formulate stable assumptions about the world which they project. For Rimbaud, the tensions and dissonances of the modern city have the potential to generate textual disorganization. There is no psychic totality in the Illuminations which might gather up the fragments of vision into an individual's point of view. The coincidence of the solicitation of desire with the deferral of its object is explored in the poem 'Solde', which exposes a vast and incongruous range of items and themes to the hyperbole of the newspaper annonce.
