SOURCE: Israel-Pelletier, Aimée. “Radical Realism: Rimbaud's Affinities with Impressionism.” Mosaic 25, no. 2 (spring 1992): 49-68.

In the following essay, Israel-Pelletier explores the nature of representation in Rimbaud's verse and its connections with Impressionist art.

There exist in Rimbaud criticism two very different approaches to his work, each of which centers upon the question of referentiality and coherence. Antoine Adam and Antoine Fongaro, for example, believe that, however difficult Rimbaud's poetry is, it has “meaning” which can be decoded; his work, they insist, can only gain from such an approach. The opposite view was initiated by Jean-Louis Baudry in his 1968-69 article in Tel Quel, in which he maintained that to work at decoding Rimbaud's poems is to dismiss the radical nature of his poetics and to undermine his place in the canon of modern poetry. Following Baudry, Tzvetan Todorov has suggested that Rimbaud's contribution to poetry is that he...