Abstract: Contemporary criticism often aligns Rimbaud with intuitive genius and creative spontaneity, incompatible with the theoretical work of the critic. Nevertheless, the letters of 13 and 15 May 1871 reveal a poetics in which Rimbaud makes use of the scholarly discourses of rhetorical and poetics treatises to interrogate the very nature of poetic speech and its object. Jacques Rivière has noted : “Rimbaud does not know what it is he says”, and it is precisely this which makes him a poet.
