Yes Peter but most of Rimbaud's readership - particularly outside of the
French - go to him because of that very biography. His discovery that 'i is
another' happened because of the way he found himself writing - the symbolist
transformation that carried him from language into 'language'. There was a
discussion a month or so back here on Mallarme which touched on the same
topic. The relationship between Rimbaud's biography and the poems is direct
but becomes immediately misdirected by his advanced aesthetic intuition - in
other words he is his own reader, for us, giving us that very purity you are
expressing a wish for - from the unbiographed text - >in spite< of
everything. That pressure could not be kept up of course, but while it did
then it was able to produce something very special. I think I am trying to
say that reading Rimbaud without prior biography would be pretty close, in a
good reader - or a reader not looking for something else -, to reading him
with the biography. Hinted at in this idea is that what he and the other
symbolists started has become an ongoing attempt to clear the debris that
obscures the gap that separates the 'I' of biography with the 'other' of
writing - a project that innovative poetries of many hues continue to pursue,
including your own.
All the best
Tim A.
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