| Author: | Émile Verhaeren |
| Title Orig: | Les Villes tentaculaires |
| Orig Lang Code: | fr |
| Country: | Belgium |
| Language: | French |
| Genre: | Symbolist poetry |
| Published: | 1895 |
| Publisher: | Edmond Deman |
| Media Type: | |
| Native Wikisource: | Les Villes tentaculaires, précédées des Campagnes hallucinées (Verhaeren) |
Les villes tentaculaires (sometimes rendered "The Great Cities" or "The Many-Tentacled Town") is a volume of Symbolist poetry 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.
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.