ABSTRACT
Critics have not been kind to René Ghil. Even those most sympathetic to him have called his literary project “a sensational failure” and “an exceptional and monstrous failure.” They have reminded us that Ghil was “one of the most prickly poets of the Symbolist era, fi lled with a dogged conviction of his own importance.” Those more actively hostile to Ghil have grouped him among the “freaks” of literature and provided unambiguously vituperative remarks such as these:
There can be little interest in the details of the sterile and arbitrary formulae which Ghil laid down for his disciples, and which amount in the long run to nothing more than a picturesque glossary of assonance. His little circle seems to have set out to make itself the repository of every misconception that could be formed about word-music, just as it did for the game of “audition colorée” and Mallarmé’s doctrine of “Ideas.”2
