Rimbaud, Arthur - Gerald Martin Macklin (essay date 1997)
Gerald Martin Macklin (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Macklin, Gerald Martin. “Representations of the Grotesque in the Early Verse of Arthur Rimbaud.” Orbis Litterarum 52, no. 4 (1997): 221-39.
[In the following essay, Macklin positions Rimbaud's preoccupation with the grotesque within the context of the nineteenth-century's similar fascination, also apparent in the work of Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.]
Noirs de loupes, grêlés, les yeux cerclés de bagues Vertes, leurs doigts boulus crispés à leurs fémurs Le sinciput plaqué de hargnosités vagues Comme les floraisons lépreuses des vieux murs;
(“Les Assis”1)
The earliest use of the term “crotesque” in French can be traced to 1532 or thereabouts and about a century later this term was replaced by “grotesque” in English. Interestingly, the original connotations of the term now seem far removed from what it...
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