« Le temps d’un langage universel » Rimbaud et la poétique télégraphique

The following article offers a telegraphic reading of Rimbaud’s “Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos de fleurs”, “Le Bateau ivre” and “Fêtes de la faim”. We consider the question of (linguistic) universality first from the point of view of a romantic legacy in French letters in order to better position it within the technologico-semiotic frame of a distinctly rimbaldian telegraphic language–one that explores the poetic and epistemic intersections of language, the geographic imaginary of the 19th-century, and rhythmic experimentation.