Word: rimbaud
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Most of today's young poets lead three-baby, two-martini lives at the universities where they serve as assistant professors. The snowy-souled coeds they shepherd through seminars must be highly skeptical about French Poet Arthur Rimbaud's formula for creative success: "Systematic derangement of the senses," sometimes through ordinary alcohol, more often with absinthe, sexual inversion and hashish...
...best of Audience in the past has been its poetry, and this edition features a few professionals, among others William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Arthur Rimbaud. (Rimbaud's Rages de Cesars is published in apposition to Lowell's "Napoleon III, a translation and colloquialization of the former.) Williams offers a limp and muted tribute to Sibelius...
Hobohemian Thoreaus. The Subterraneans celebrates that "systematic derangement of the senses" from which Rimbaud concocted his visions of hell. The difference is that Jack Kerouac, ex-merchant seaman, ex-railroad brakeman, is not Rimbaud but a kind of latrine laureate of Hobohemia. The story line of The Subterraneans is simple and stark: it concerns a short, manic-depressive love affair between a "big paranoic bum" and occasional writer named Leo Percepied and a near-insane Negro girl named Mardou Fox. Says Kerouac: "I wrote this book in three full-moon nights," and it reads that way. The details...
...French. The implication was clear. Two years later, ostensibly charged with wounding Rimbaud with a pistol during a quarrel, but in effect charged with homosexuality, Verlaine was sentenced to two years' imprisonment at hard labor. Later a Paris court awarded Mathilde a separation decree. These catastrophes, in the opinion of British Biographers Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson, proved the making of Verlaine. Stripped of both wife and friend, he went straight to the prison chaplain, asked to be received back into the church. He "happily began to write religious poems" and, on his release from prison, lived for years without...
Most of Verlaine's greatest poems (La Bonne Chanson, Sagesse, Romances sans paroles) express a medley of sensuality, longing and faith. Verlaine learned a "new" French-strong, vigorous and plain. He and Rimbaud broke down "the barrier between poet and reader by using French as it was then spoken"-not as courtiers of the past had spoken it. They changed the monotonous, end-of-line rhyme, throwing the stress not where elegance demanded it, but "where the sense lay." Where Verlaine used the old end rhyme, he made it run rather than halt-and how hauntingly and simply...