Post 3: (Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/The Drunken Boat)

"Had I but antecedents at some point in the history of France! But no, nothing. It is quite clear to me that I have always been of an inferior race. I cannot understand revolt. My race never rose except to pillage: like wolves that worry the beast they have not killed."

central to much of Rimbaud is a frantic idea of absence. of an absence that alienates the poet, the individual, against a spiritual collective. it is Rimbaud's various, incessant sense of removal that urges him to the page, as well as a historical self-disdain, the insurgent self-deprecating lament. "My race never rose..." Rimbaud's identity is conceived in a memory of nothing, and still this attachment. a poet whose conscience is laden with the crimes of all his men, his compatriots, even when his country is none other than his own. even from the limelight of his attic, the poet sees his face of all the dying imperial.