Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford;

Forms of Poetic Attention by Lucy Alford;

Author:Lucy Alford;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)


From the Poetry of Resignation to the Resignation of Poetry: Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud’s final works, Une Saison en enfer and Les Illuminations,15 take us through the fitful stages of arrival at a limit of experience, thought, and belief, ultimately demonstrating a limit of the poetics of resignation in the poet’s decision to resign from poetry wholesale. While it is impossible to know the full spectrum of reasons for this final “adieu” to the written word, in the poems themselves we find a speaker wrestling with disillusionment with the Western industrialized world (a world embodied in London, the city where Rimbaud spent the final years of his poetic career before quitting both writing and Europe at the age of twenty, ultimately to settle in Yemen). The poems shift between modes of cynical reflection on the cityscape and its inhabitants, responding sometimes with boredom, sometimes with attempted (often failed, always temporary) escapes to delirium. Their oscillation between fragmented, short-line vers libre and the unconfined velocities of the prose form suggest this torn position between indulgence and renunciation.16

Throughout Une Saison en enfer we find exclamations of distress, disgust, and removal from the modern world. Despite the emotional intensity of the poems, a quality of detachment and disconnection pervades, as though the speaker were constantly, willfully, and forcibly repelled or repulsed from any proximity or involvement with the human life and terrains around him. The speaker of Une Saison is seemingly crowded by the world and at the same time isolated from it. The speaker is, in many ways, the sole subject of the poems as a whole, for despite the cramming of descriptive fragments of the world, the “I” is the obsessive center of every poem’s every line. The “I” is one who is “no longer in the world”: “Ah ça! l’horloge de la vie s’est arrêtée tout à l’heure. Je ne suis plus au monde.”17 Rimbaud’s poetics of resignation is one of a speaker expelled from connection with the world. There is no object of attention in these poems outside of the speaker’s own voice, an echo chamber of estrangements and exclamations, unable to attend to or connect to—to be at home in—the world as it has become: “Décidément, nous sommes hors du monde. Plus aucun son. Mon tact a disparu. Ah! mon château, ma Saxe, mon bois de saules. Les soirs, les matins, les nuits, les jours … Suis-je las!”18 While Les Illuminations was probably completed after Une Saison en enfer, the latter forms the most direct address to Rimbaud’s final resignation from the modern world and his poetic adieu. He writes in the prose poem “L’impossible,” “J’ai eu raison de mépriser ces bonshommes qui ne perdraient pas l’occasion d’une caresse, parasites de la propreté et de la santé de nos femmes, aujourd’hui qu’elles sont si peu d’accord avec nous. / J’ai eu raison dans tous mes dédains: puisque je m’évade! / Je m’évade!”19

Central to both Une Saison en enfer and Les Illuminations is a quality of fatigue that runs through even the most convulsive passages.



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