What do you think?
Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material
Bodies abound in Rimbaud's poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies.
The question that Poetry, Politics, and the Body seeks to answer What does this corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus, from first to lastDSfrom the earliest poems in verse celebrating the sheer, simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one's legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, this book argues that the body appearsDSoften literallyDSas a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud's poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged 'lyrical material' for a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it
also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, 'real' socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems. Rimbaud's bodies are, in other words, utopian sites where the historical and the lyrical, the ideal and the material, do not so much cancel each other out as become caught up in one another.
The question that Poetry, Politics, and the Body seeks to answer What does this corporeal density mean for reading Rimbaud? What kind of sense are we to make of this omnipresence of the body in the Rimbaldian corpus, from first to lastDSfrom the earliest poems in verse celebrating the sheer, simple delight of running away from wherever one is and stretching one's legs out under a table, to the ultimate flight away from poetry itself? In response, this book argues that the body appearsDSoften literallyDSas a kind of gap, breach, or aperture through which Rimbaud's poems enter into contact with history and a larger body of other texts. Simply put, the body is privileged 'lyrical material' for a figure for human beings in their exposed, finite creatureliness and in their unpredictable agency and interconnectedness. Its presence in the early work allows us not only to contemplate what a strange, sensuous thing it is to be embodied, to be both singular and part of a collective, it
also allows the poet to diagnose, and the reader to perceive, a set of seemingly intractable, 'real' socio-economic, political, and symbolic problems. Rimbaud's bodies are, in other words, utopian sites where the historical and the lyrical, the ideal and the material, do not so much cancel each other out as become caught up in one another.
284 pages, Hardcover
Published November 6, 2018
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
May 23, 2026
Rimbaud is the thinker of revolutionary embodiment. Rimbaudian bodies are prophetically creative insofar as they are circumscribed within nature's 'caesura', i.e. the 'unknown', the source of the liberatory and novel forms only accessible by the "total derangement of the senses" (the experience of "all forms of love, suffering, and madness").
In his metonymic and metaphorical transformation of human forms and poetic meter, he champions sexual alterity against patriarchal 'rococo' Bourgeois family norms in 'Romans' and the 'Sonnet du trou du cul', captures the barbarism of poverty in 'Effarés", and challenges the productivism of the second Napoleonic empire through the valorisation of the naive and trivial 'unproductive leisure' of the Cabarets in "Evening Prayer".
In his metonymic and metaphorical transformation of human forms and poetic meter, he champions sexual alterity against patriarchal 'rococo' Bourgeois family norms in 'Romans' and the 'Sonnet du trou du cul', captures the barbarism of poverty in 'Effarés", and challenges the productivism of the second Napoleonic empire through the valorisation of the naive and trivial 'unproductive leisure' of the Cabarets in "Evening Prayer".
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review