Rimbaud's Theatre of the Self

In his interpretation of a poet who has swayed the course of modern poetry - in France and elsewhere - Lawler focuses on what he demonstrates is the crux of Rimbaud's imagination: the masks and adopted personas with which he regularly tested his identity and his art. A drama emerges in Lawler's reading. The thinking, feeling, acting Drunken Boat is an early theatrical projection of the poet's self; the Inventor, the Memorialist and the Ingenu assume distinct roles in his later verse. It is, however, in "Illuminations" and "Une Saison en enfer" that Rimbaud enacts most powerfully his grandiose dreams. Here the poet becomes Self-Creator, Self-Critic, Self-Ironist; he takes the parts of Floodmaker, Oriental Storyteller, Dreamer, Lover; and he recounts his descent into Hell in the guise of a Confessor. In delineating and exploring the poet's "theatre of the self", Lawler aims to show the tragic lucidity and the dramatic coherence of Rimbaud's work.