Dec 30, 2009

The Drunken Boat | The Drunken Boat

At a glance:

The Poem

“The Drunken Boat” was written by the sixteen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud as a demonstration of his poetic skills for the audience of poets that he expected to meet in Paris in 1871. The one hundred lines of the poem are divided into twenty-five quatrains, Alexandrines rhymed abab, which are quite traditional and conventional. Beneath the controlled surface, however, seethes a turmoil of complex and conflicting, but interdependent, thoughts and feelings. The poem is a statement of adolescent rebellion and a hymn to liberation and independence. It expresses the...

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