His influence has passed down through the generations, too, with figures as wide-ranging as Marcel Proust, André Freynaud, David Wojnarowicz, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Regina Hansen all acknowledging a degree of debt to Rimbaud's way of working. ![]() Rimbaud had led the way in showing how one could visualize the workings of the subconscious. Following Rimbaud's example, many Dadaists and Surrealists engaged in spontaneous wordplay and other games and activities associated with free association and collage.His writing, which sometimes ventured into mysticism and spiritualism, also dared to celebrate the "virtues" of apathy, laziness, and vice. He would reject all forms of scholarly rationalism, and all concessions to traditional family and civic values. His complex relationship with his domineering mother is well documented by biographers, and it saw him rebel against her strict Catholic standards. Thematically, Rimbaud's poetry also challenged conservative norms.His early association with the Symbolist movement is founded on the understanding that he used signs that alluded to deeper meanings and feelings. It did not matter to him if his visions lacked coherence or shape, and it was images, and the ideas he associated with those images, that determined the arrangement of his poetry. ![]() In an approach to writing verse he famously described as a "rational derangement of all the senses", Rimbaud allowed his own observations to dictate his experiments with language and the rhythmic flow of his poems. Rimbaud fully tested the boundaries of traditional forms of verse.As for the content of his writing, one must consider that Rimbaud prefaced many literary movements, including psychoanalysis in his attempt to let one's "true self" write by "deranging the senses" his focus on synesthesia predated the Dada movement and allowed him to become a godfather to the Surrealists his themes of impotence and suffering foreshadowed the existentialists and his use of multiple narrators foresaw the upcoming modernists in 20th century America. First and foremost, Rimbaud was a thinker and then a writer but, unlike many philosophical writers (verses aesthetic writers, i.e.-Proust), he rarely lapses into didacticism. That said, the prose poetry of this child-man artist was an attempt to break away from all types of oppression in all forms (as viewed by Rimbaud): tradition, social expectation, as well as literary convention. However, with any work of art, the true test will be the content of the work rather than the person behind the pen. The works of Rimbaud have become as famous for the character of the writer as for the writings themselves. The genre is indebted to the invention, passion and beauty expressed by this tormented soul who simply couldn't get enough of life. His destitution, lust for life and piquant sensibilities abound in the light and shadow of his poetry. His life was lived to the hilt as he traveled worldwide with Paul Verlaine and traded adventure incessantly. ![]() Rimbaud believed that the poet must deliberately become an antagonist and work to place one's sensibilities into constant upheaveal in order to write poetry that is truly revelatory. But his poetry is so original and personal and inventive that the genre metamorphosed by his unique literary perspective. At times, he reminded me of Blake and Yeats. His stirring soul is seared by his epiphanies expressed in simple, clean and gleaming imagery. He brought a sharp, new incandescence, a flaring literary reality, a breakthrough perception to poetry expressed by his point of view. ![]() Rimbaud's prose poems challenged the traditonal style of the Romantics who wrote before him. This is a tall order, I know, but the very best writers change the way that their genre is perceived. The mark of an extraordinary writer to me has always had something to do with whether the writer's genre was enhanced by the writer.
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