SOURCE: Peschel, Enid Rhodes. “‘To Plunge Into the Bottom of the Abyss’: Rimbaud's Search for the Unknown in The Drunken Boat and Memory.” Sou'wester 6, no. 1 (winter 1978): 73-85.

In the following essay, Peschel probes the conflicting impulses, the sense of despair, and the sense of thwarted desire to discern the “unknown” that is central to Rimbaud's verse.

Although Rimbaud's poetry was written for the most part between 1869 and 1874, it was published in the 1880s, during the heyday of French symbolism. At that time, Rimbaud's remarkable and revolutionary poetic achievements were not immediately appreciated or understood. “Aside from Rimbaud's sonnet Vowels, The Drunken Boat and several passages of A Season in Hell, Rimbaud's work and its revolutionary meaning were overlooked by the symbolists of the literary societies of 1885-1895,” notes Henri Peyre in his excellent study Qu'est-ce que le symbolisme?¹ Only with later writers, in fact—with Gide, Valéry...