> I'm certain the book's excellent, but what has it to do with the poems?
I don`t think this is the time, the place, the person to definitively
settle (should that prove possible) the qualities of the set of
relations between a poet`s biography and the poems. Harding`s
review-essay is interesting in the way it (all-too-briefly) uses the
lettre du voyant to argue that Rimbaud`s Communard allegiance is more
disputable than many critics have been willing to admit. That the
treatment of working-class insurgents in even the most seemingly
straightforwardly Communard poems (L`Orgie parisienne; Les Mains de
Jeanne-Marie, for example) can be seen from a certain angle as
insulting. (Harding says that the letter to Paul Demeny shows
Rimbaud mutating from an "activist" into a "head", to use Harding`s
own Sixties terminology.) As many of Rimbaud`s post-1871 poems,
including the Illuminations, have been read, subsequently, through a
Communard/Marxist filter, this is not an unimportant argument.
(Modesty precludes me from mentioning my little essay, "A Question of
Pitch: Rimbaud in the City of Prose" from the second issue of
Southfields magazine, ed. Richard Price, a couple of years ago, which
touched on the same topic.) The link with the Nicholl book, which
Harding does not make in his article, might be that Nicholl`s
portrait of Rimbaud, as an entirely, implacably, self-interested and
taciturn bastard boss-from-Hell as likely to be as cruel as
compassionate might just have led Harding to reflect upon the
likelihood of Rimbaud ever managing to exhibit selfless
identification with the working-man or -woman. But that`s just
speculation on my part. For all I know, Alison, Nicholl`s book may
well have nothing to tell us about the poems; it`s very interesting
on the North African slave trade in the nineteenth century, on
patterns of immigration and exploration, on tribal custom, ethnic and
religious tension between tribes and white European entrepreneurs &c.
all best
robin
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