by Zoë Pollock
Daniel Mendelsohn captures the allure of the rebellious Arthur Rimbaud:
He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home
town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”
(Portrait of Rimbaud at age seventeen by Étienne Carjat via Wikimedia Commons)
The Dish 