L'Art de Rimbaud (review)

Michel Murat is best known as a specialist of twentieth-century French literature, with an emphasis on modernity, style, poetics, and versification. He has published several major studies of Julien Gracq's stylistics and poetics, in particular on the role of names and analogy in Le Rivage des Syrtes, as well as books on Desnos, Breton, and French verse (Le Vers français: Histoire, théorie, esthétique). Murat's latest work of criticism, a book entitled L'Art de Rimbaud, makes use of the author's rich perspectives on French modernity to take us into Rimbaud's poetic world.

Rimbaud sees his poetic project as inventing the unknown, and he alludes to the necessity of finding new forms. Michel Murat incorporates Rimbaud's perspective within his critical project of reflection on the history of poetic forms. He sees Rimbaud as an innovator within the nineteenth-century French poetic tradition. The book is divided into two parts. The first part studies versification, rhyme, and the sonnet; the second part explores Illuminations as a collection of prose poems. Throughout the book, individual poems are contextualized within the period as well as within Rimbaud's corpus and in light of the production of other nineteenth-century French poets (Hugo, Banville, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé). Individual chapters explore larger questions of poetic style, including Rimbaud's vocabulary, citations and allusions, the use of grammar, the importance of syntax in the prose poems, and the opposition between verse and prose. The book sheds light on the most difficult—idiosyncratic and gnomic as well as charismatic—elements of Rimbaud's writings.

Murant sees Rimbaud as a nineteenth-century poet rather than a precursor of twentieth-century modernity. Rimbaud's art is based on technical mastery, and the book documents Rimbaud's explorations and his progression, poem after poem, within the framework of nineteenth-century poetry. The depth and breadth of Murat's readings of Rimbaud make this book indispensable reading for students and teachers of modernity and poetics. L'Art de Rimbaud will be an important element in future Rimbaud scholarship for its mature vision of a brilliant young poet who saw himself as an outlaw in literature before leaving old Europe and, with it, the world of literature. For its thoughtful and subtle readings of a challenging corpus and its assessment of the impact of poetic, historical, and material circumstances on Rimbaud's work, Murat's book should take its place among major works of contemporary Rimbaud scholarship.