>there are very few poems by Rimbaud I would want to call
>"adolescent". Perhaps none.
The fact remains that Rimbaud was literally adolescent, by which I mean
the early stage of adulthood where childhood is still foregrounded. It's
a very potent period. The impact a beautiful adolescent girl can have on
you - Dante's Beatrice, say - is partly because she is still a child and
still *innocent* (I don't mean by this an idealised idea of innocence - I
have children and know that's ridiculous - but children are, in a crucial
sense, innocent to the world - no matter when and where they are).
Rimbaud is extraordinarily precocious, intellectually and emotionally and
of course linguistically, but he is still encountering experience for the
first time, with that initial extremity of response and also, often, with
the limitations of a child. There are not many poets who are writing like
Rimbaud does precisely at that point (at the moment I can't think of
any). It depends whether you mean "adolescent" in a perjorative sense or
not - I mean adolescent in the sense of an intolerably raw exposure to
emotional and imaginative experience, and another sense of limitlessness.
I think it's a valuable quality in the work, part of its attraction,
although as I hope was clear, by itself it's as limiting a reading as any
other. But lines like "Will a day of success make us forget the shame of
our fatal clumsiness?" and so on are irresistitibly those of an
adolescent.
> (Incidentally, why M/CLASS adolescent angst?)
I was thinking of Mme Rimbaud's suffocating social aspirations - how she
lined them up like ducks and promenaded them each Sunday and wouldn't let
them play with the scruffy working class children, etc. And also the
devotion to money.
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