Ghil, René (1862-1925). Initially a disciple of Mallarmé, whose preface to Ghil's Traité du verbe of 1886 placed the young poet at the forefront of the Symbolist movement, Ghil broke with him in 1888 to develop his own ‘verbal instrumentism’; in this he adapted elements from Wagner, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud into a theory of poetic expression which claimed to provide a scientific basis for the aesthetic equivalence of musical sound, colour, and phoneme. This synthesis of artistic forms would in turn express the hidden laws of humanity's history and development which form the subject of Ghil's verse, more important for its ambition than its achievement.
[James Kearns]
