Rimbaud
Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2012 3:24 am
The French Poet Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud’s visionary poetry reads as fresh and inspiring today as it has always done and that is its amazing quality. “A thousand Dreams within me softly burn” he wrote. Born in the Ardennes in 1854 he gave up poetry before he was 20 and became an adventurer in Africa, dead before 50, but what he wrote influenced the symbolist movements across the arts, Dada, Surrealism, Henry Miller, Antonioni, Kerouac and the Beatniks and all non-conformist seekers of truth.
Article taken from Bernard's post.
Rimbaud, I read as a girl, with no other thoughts than to his tortured life as a poet.
Today I read his words and think of what Germain Greer had to say about him and it is summarised thus:
"My patience with the banal theme of anal sex is over. Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote a sonnet about the "trou du cul". Moi aussi j'ai un trou du cul. I have also an asshole Part of the octave by Verlaine reads:
Dark and puckered like a violet carnation
It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,
Still moist from an amorous inclination which follows the gentle dip
Of the white buttocks down to the edge of its scarlet hem.
These days everything is ironic, so describing an anus as a violet carnation must be deliberately over the top, as tasteless as dressing a toilet roll in a crocheted tutu. To suggest that anyone would worship an anus is a consciously outrageous contrivance. A preference for the anus is actually as banal and ridiculous as any other sexual fixation.
Rimbaud was the "infernal bridegroom" and the older Verlaine the "foolish virgin". Rimbaud allowed him to believe that he was the passive partner and let the older poet satisfy himself on him as much as he liked; only among the middle classes would you find two drunks trying to scandalise their equally middle-class drinking companions by advertising their sexual preferences.) Since classical antiquity, being on the receiving end has been understood to be inappropriate and degrading for grown men. Rimbaud fascinates his readers because he controlled, harassed and terrorised Verlaine "in the bedroom".
As a variant on the penetration theme, anal intercourse has been used probably more often by heterosexuals than homosexuals. There are few human societies in which it is unknown, though none is prepared to admit that the practice is at all common.
Most people are unaware that the pinnacle of the relationship between Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover is an episode of anal intercourse, which burnt out "the shames, the deepest oldest shames in the most secret places", arriving at "the refinements of passion". "It took some getting at, the core of physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it." Lawrence elaborates the rapists' fantasy, that what women dread they secretly desire. "And how in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!"
In her 1936 biography of Rimbaud, Enid Starkie theorises that he discovered his sexuality after he was raped by soldiers. For Rimbaud, this was "a sudden and blinding revelation of what sex really was". Yet there is no indication in the documentation of Rimbaud's life that this rape happened. What is interesting is looking at anal penetration from a woman's point of view, one can see just how ordinary and unrefined it actually is."
My Rimbaud of 2012.
Rimbaud’s visionary poetry reads as fresh and inspiring today as it has always done and that is its amazing quality. “A thousand Dreams within me softly burn” he wrote. Born in the Ardennes in 1854 he gave up poetry before he was 20 and became an adventurer in Africa, dead before 50, but what he wrote influenced the symbolist movements across the arts, Dada, Surrealism, Henry Miller, Antonioni, Kerouac and the Beatniks and all non-conformist seekers of truth.
Article taken from Bernard's post.
Rimbaud, I read as a girl, with no other thoughts than to his tortured life as a poet.
Today I read his words and think of what Germain Greer had to say about him and it is summarised thus:
"My patience with the banal theme of anal sex is over. Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote a sonnet about the "trou du cul". Moi aussi j'ai un trou du cul. I have also an asshole Part of the octave by Verlaine reads:
Dark and puckered like a violet carnation
It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,
Still moist from an amorous inclination which follows the gentle dip
Of the white buttocks down to the edge of its scarlet hem.
These days everything is ironic, so describing an anus as a violet carnation must be deliberately over the top, as tasteless as dressing a toilet roll in a crocheted tutu. To suggest that anyone would worship an anus is a consciously outrageous contrivance. A preference for the anus is actually as banal and ridiculous as any other sexual fixation.
Rimbaud was the "infernal bridegroom" and the older Verlaine the "foolish virgin". Rimbaud allowed him to believe that he was the passive partner and let the older poet satisfy himself on him as much as he liked; only among the middle classes would you find two drunks trying to scandalise their equally middle-class drinking companions by advertising their sexual preferences.) Since classical antiquity, being on the receiving end has been understood to be inappropriate and degrading for grown men. Rimbaud fascinates his readers because he controlled, harassed and terrorised Verlaine "in the bedroom".
As a variant on the penetration theme, anal intercourse has been used probably more often by heterosexuals than homosexuals. There are few human societies in which it is unknown, though none is prepared to admit that the practice is at all common.
Most people are unaware that the pinnacle of the relationship between Connie and Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover is an episode of anal intercourse, which burnt out "the shames, the deepest oldest shames in the most secret places", arriving at "the refinements of passion". "It took some getting at, the core of physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallos alone could explore it." Lawrence elaborates the rapists' fantasy, that what women dread they secretly desire. "And how in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it!"
In her 1936 biography of Rimbaud, Enid Starkie theorises that he discovered his sexuality after he was raped by soldiers. For Rimbaud, this was "a sudden and blinding revelation of what sex really was". Yet there is no indication in the documentation of Rimbaud's life that this rape happened. What is interesting is looking at anal penetration from a woman's point of view, one can see just how ordinary and unrefined it actually is."
My Rimbaud of 2012.
