SOURCE: Macklin, Gerald Martin. “Representations of the Grotesque in the Early Verse of Arthur Rimbaud.” Orbis Litterarum 52, no. 4 (1997): 221-39.

In the following essay, Macklin positions Rimbaud's preoccupation with the grotesque within the context of the nineteenth-century's similar fascination, also apparent in the work of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.

Noirs de loupes, grêlés, les yeux cerclés de bagues Vertes, leurs doigts boulus crispés à leurs fémurs Le sinciput plaqué de hargnosités vagues Comme les floraisons lépreuses des vieux murs; 

(“Les Assis”¹)

The earliest use of the term “crotesque” in French can be traced to 1532 or thereabouts and about a century later this term was replaced by “grotesque” in English. Interestingly, the original connotations of the term now seem far removed from what it has come to designate for the late twentieth century reader or literary analyst. What...