Abstract: The outline of an explicit poetics (systematic and theoretical) in Rimbaud’s letters cannot live up to his work and its implicit poetics because the latter were produced “before”. To remedy his hesitations as a theorist, Rimbaud inserts example-poems in the letters which are meant to speak for themselves. The key notions (visionary, form, unknown, universal language, etc.) are reformulated with the help of a metalanguage based on the linguistic sciences and literary history.
