/lit/ - Literature

[Isabelle Huppert !!lYVA4YXz75M No.1179893]

I have a question for those you of who are knowledgeable about the history of poetry.

Earlier this evening I was reading the introduction to a book of Rimbaud's poetry (Rimbaud Complete - translated, edited and with an introduction by Wyatt Mason) and on pages xxxiv-xxxv Mason writes (after selectively quoting the poems mentioned):

"The first, ‘The Orphans' New Year's Gifts,’ is a highly polished pastiche of a style of sentimental poetry prevalent in the day (angels, orphans, poverty), the wistful poet casting a misty eye on the misanthrope, at which Hugo was master. The second, ‘Sensation,’ roots the reader in an entirely different and far more individual voice. Abandoned is the guise of impersonal, all-knowing Poet descanting from the empyrean; adopted is a sensual, personal directness of sensory experience. It is a love poem, written to Nature, but without Nature being mediated through the mythic: no Venus intercedes to garland the young bard with rings of flowers. In the third, ‘The Drunken Boat,’ Rimbaud removes the poet from the poem altogether: instead, a boat, having lost its crew, drifts through the wreck of the world's waters recounting its own journey, a leap from simile to anthropomorphization that was, in its time, a radically new means of poetic expression. In just eighteen months, Rimbaud moved from the method of poetic apprenticeship favored by Dr. Johnson - that of scrupulous imitation - to utter originality."

My question is: Is this true? Did anthropomorphization in poetry originate with Rimbaud? I feel like this is unlikely, but if it didn’t, then why is Mason claiming “The Drunken Boat” to be so startling original?

[Anonymous No.1179897]

Fuck off you stupid commie.

[Anonymous No.1179902]

>>1179893
Mason is claiming that Rimbaud is hot shit because he has devoted his life to studying Rimbaud. If Rimbaud is not the awesomest, Mason has wasted his career.

"Moving from simile to anthropomorphization" sounds an awful lot like "using a metaphor." Believe it or not, Rimbaud did not invent the metaphor.

[Isabelle Huppert !!lYVA4YXz75M No.1179911]

>>1179902

>Believe it or not, Rimbaud did not invent the metaphor.

Really? Thanks for clearing that up!

[Anonymous No.1179918]

>translated poetry

[Isabelle Huppert !!lYVA4YXz75M No.1179928]

>>1179918

I've read "The Drunken Boat" in French, as well, but if you'll refer to my initial question, it doesn't really concern Mason's translations.

[Anonymous No.1179965]

>translated poetry

[Anonymous No.1180105]

>>1179918
Nothing wrong with translated poetry, provided the translator is a competent one. It's the same with translated prose: obviously, the aesthetics of the original language are hard to translate with both the meaning and grace/subtlety intact, but not impossible.

But I guess haters gonna hate.

[Anonymous No.1180434]

>>My question is: Is this true? Did anthropomorphization in poetry originate with Rimbaud?

Absolutely not. In the first century AD, Ovid has a poem called "Nux" ("The Walnut Tree") which is a monologue spoken by a tree. And in the first century BC, Catullus has a poem about an anthropomorphized boat (c. 4, "Phaselus ille") which is not far off from the Bateau Ivre. Not to mention the fact that Rimbaud--who famously could improvise poems in Latin hexameters as a schoolboy--probably knew both of these examples.

>I feel like this is unlikely, but if it didn’t, then why is Mason claiming “The Drunken Boat” to be so startling original?

What he's claiming as original is the "leap from simile to anthropomorphization", in other words, the idea of moving beyond the explicit likening of one thing to another---i.e., "my life is like a drunken boat", or "life is like a drunken boat"---to just letting the boat do its own talking and leaving the meaning up to the reader. Underneath the ridiculous hyperbole, he does have a real point: the point he's making, in tracing Rimbaud's development, should be understood as a way of talking about Rimbaud's relationship to the Symbolist movement in literature. He seems to have arrived at the same methods independently of other French poets, and at an amazingly young age. But Mason doesn't feel like dragging in the whole history of Symbolism with Poe and Baudelaire and the rest, so he's just trying to sidestep a discussion of literary history by making an exaggerated claim.

[Isabelle Huppert !!lYVA4YXz75M No.1180719]

>>1180434

Thanks. You've been very helpful.