Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud

Lyrical Material

Robert St. Clair

Explores the significance of 'the body' and embodiment in Arthur Rimbaud's work
Links poetry to revolutionary history and politics
Examines Rimbaud's work in relation to other poets such as Banville, Baudelaire, Hugo, and Verlaine
Provides close readings of select texts and careful historical and critical contextualization

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud

Lyrical Material

Robert St. Clair

Description

Bodies abound in Rimbaud's poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic canon: lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies.

The question that Poetry, Politics, and the Body seeks to answer is: What does this corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus, from first to last–from the earliest poems in verse celebrating the sheer, simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one's legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, this book argues that the body appears–often literally–as a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud's poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged 'lyrical material' for Rimbaud: a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, 'real' socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems. Rimbaud's bodies are, in other words, utopian bodies: sites where the historical and the lyrical, the ideal and the material, do not so much cancel each other out as become caught up in one another.

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud

Lyrical Material

Robert St. Clair

Introduction
1:(Departures). Natural Bodies: (Eco)Poetics and the Politics of the Aesthetic: "Sensation"
2:(Diagnostic). Impoverished Bodies: "Les Effarés" and the Misery of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric
3:(Prognosis). Happy Bodies, Happy Hours: "Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir"
4:(Anamnesis). Revolting Bodies: "Le Forgeron" and the Poetry of the Past
5:(Conclusion). Other Bodies: Rimbaud, Verlaine, and L'Idole—Le Sonnet du trou du cul

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud

Lyrical Material

Robert St. Clair

Author Information

Robert St. Clair, Assistant Professor of French, Dartmouth College

Robert St.Clair is Assistant Professor of French at Dartmouth College and co-editor-in-chief of Parade sauvage, the international journal of Rimbaud studies.

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud

Lyrical Material

Robert St. Clair

Reviews and Awards

"I can say with certainty that he has written a serious study that draws meaningful conclusions about the subtle ways in which social and historical presence ... They are conclusions from which any reader of nineteenth-century poetry can profit. I certainly have." - Marshall Olds, H-France Review

"Robert St. Clair's study of Rimbaud's early verse is erudite, wide-ranging in argumentation, and sensitive to the intricacies of poetry's expressivity." - Daniel A. Finch-Race, L'Esprit Créateur

"Robert St. Clair's brilliant new book Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material...demonstrates how even poems from 1870 contain stresses and cracks, formal imperfections that discreetly make the irruption to come little more than a matter of time.... A fruitful tension runs throughout Poetry, Politics & the Body between St. Clair's vast learning and Rimbaud's own poems" - Thomas C. Connolly, Yale University, French Forum

"In this important contribution to Rimbaud studies, Robert St. Clair moves fluidly among cultural studies, critical theory, intertextuality, and close readings to provide a focused yet wide-ranging consideration of the historical and political valences of the representation of bodies in Rimbaud's lyric poetry ... Rimbaud's bodies are, on St. Clair's account, social and historical; the book insightfully maps the way those bodies are represented in poetic and historical space." - Joseph Acquisto, French Studies