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Unread 05-07-2022, 05:14 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Hi Sarah-Jane,

I've not heard of the Situationists or Debord but their notion of derive sounds both helpful and a possible debt to Rimbaud. That's exactly how his boat drifts, after all. btw the boat is his narrator, not any human.
Rimbaud tends to get neglected by C19th literary critics, at least in English. I find him startling, troubling, weird - truly epochal - as Verlaine is not and Mallarme is maybe. And he quit poetry at twenty. His dying words (at 37) allegedly were Poetry is shit. If you'd like to read some, I'd suggest A Season in Hell and Illuminations, both of which I think can be read in English if need be. Illuminations is largely prose poems, which gives translators more space and freedom.
Here's an amazing sonnet he wrote at 16, inspired by the Franco_Prussian war: https://blogs.transparent.com/french...ormeur-du-val/
Rimbaud was a rebel from a conservative mother, running away to Paris at 16 and shacking up with the much older (and married) Verlaine, who tried to shoot him later. It does little credit to Verlaine in my books. There is definitely progressive thought in his work, sympathy for the poor and downtrodden, but there's also drugs and the search for the absolute in art. He then went and ran guns to Ethiopia and married a Muslim lady - he may have helped Ethiopia defeat the Italians, unique in African history, so OK, a bit anticolonial, a bit anticapitalist. But I find neither central to his art. Don't know about his thought.
Rimbaud became a big icon to a lot of people, which I think some critics resent. He can be sexist - I have poems of his students dislike - but mostly, he wanted to push the envelope, and I think he is without peer in the history of poetry for teen writing. Mostly 16-18, before he quit. And rebel, absolutely so.

Cheers,
John

Oh - he was also quite beautiful. You can google an image if you like.

Last edited by John Isbell; 05-07-2022 at 05:17 PM.
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