Les villes tentaculaires (
transl.The Tentacular Towns, sometimes rendered "The Great Cities" or "The Many-Tentacled Town") is a volume of
Symbolistpoetry in French by the Belgian
Émile Verhaeren, first published in 1895 by
Edmond Deman, with a frontispiece by
Théo van Rysselberghe. It established the poet's European reputation,[1][2] and his stature as "a true pioneer of Modernism".[3] The loose theme of the collection is modern urban life and the transformation of the countryside by
urban sprawl.[4]
The theme of
urban sprawl had already been broached in Verhaeren's 1893 collection Les campagnes hallucinées ("The hallucinated fields").[5] The two collections were generally printed together in one volume from 1904 onwards.
Contents
In the 18th edition of the joint publication Les Villes tentaculaires, précédées des Campagnes hallucinées (Paris, 1920), the poems included were as follows. A few of the poems have been published in English translation by
Will Stone.