Rimbaud, Arthur - Victor-Guy Aboulaffia (essay date fall-winter 1993-1994)
Victor-Guy Aboulaffia (essay date fall-winter 1993-1994)
SOURCE: Aboulaffia, Victor-Guy. “Rimbaud and the Ideology of Art for Art's Sake.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 22, nos. 1 & 2 (fall-winter 1993-1994): 172-94.
[In the following essay, Aboulaffia contends that Rimbaud rejected the notion of “pure poetry” as an art form aimed at elite readers.]
Arthur Rimbaud's first act of aesthetic revolt can be sensed in the way he opposed the dominant writing protocols of the Parnasse poetry school.1 This aestheticist movement endorsed a set of constraining idealistic assumptions regarding literary activity, which gave an exaggerated importance to technical skills over content, and demanded an attitude of emotional detachment on the poet's part, in a somewhat uncanny return of a repressed Classical rigor, now triumphant over the excessive and unruly affects of the Romantic period. Leconte de Lisle's strict...
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