Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form
Author's Department
English & Comparative Literature Department
Document Type
Research Article
Publication Title
Analecta Husserliana
Publication Date
2000
doi
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3431-8_10
Abstract
The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible “worlds” containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary text. In this paper, I shall discuss the emergence of three related aesthetic worlds: first, Rimbaud’s Illuminations provides the “mythic” occasion for the eruption of post-Symbolist literature; second, Williams’ Spring and All develops Rimbaud’s poetics in terms of twentieth-century modernism; finally, the conception of Baroque form as explored in recent aesthetics unites Rimbaud and Williams in the shared task of overcoming Cartesian dualism.
First Page
149
Last Page
158
Recommended Citation
Melaney, W.D. (2000). Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Poetry of Life in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 69. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3431-8_10