SOURCE: "Poetic Knowledge," in The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, 1885-1895, second edition, Basil Blackwell, 1968, pp. 74-128.

In the excerpt that follows, Lehmann places Laforgue's use of the terms rêve and the Unconscious in the context of how Symbolist poets in general understood certain abstract concepts.

Rimbaud undoubtedly thought—and many others have done so too—that in a world of ever-increasing uniformity and restriction, dreams offered the only safe refuge for a poet anxious to expand his individuality and enjoy that measure of freedom which is necessary for the cultivation of metaphorical warts on the face. The attitude is understandable, but fallacious: firstly, because the strangeness of a dream is no guarantee that a poem written out of it will be good poetry; secondly, because not long afterwards it became plain that dreams are not quite as 'free' as he had hoped. Rimbaud's merits as a poet...