Abstract: On two occasions in “Alchimie du verbe”, Rimbaud refers to the poems of the spring of 1872 and the “Voyelles” sonnet as sophisms. A literary recollection, the term sophism covers the entirety of hallucinatory stylistic creative processes. It reflects Rimbaud’s ambiguous judgement of his own poetics, underling the risk of the banalisation threatening literary creation. It also relates to the device of captatio benevolentiæ.
