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Prose Poems from Les Illuminations of Arthur Rimbaud Put Into English By Helen Rootham

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Rimbaud had written some of the best French poetry by his teenage years, then left poetry, with the rest of his life rather mundanely spent, running guns, for example, in Abyssinia. His poetry has great beauty and sinuousness. Rimbaud is essential reading for those interested not only in French poetry but also adolescent psychology. Too, the psychological aspects of Rimbaud's genious have been well explored by a number of authors. The great poetic potentialities that became eclipsed by later ordinary preoccupations of day to day life suggests an interesting developmental process seen in normal adolescence--transcendence, love of words and abstraction in adolescent, and then an eclipsing of those abilities in maturity. t may be unseemly to discuss such great poetry from the point of view of psychology, but whatever his genius, Rimbaud did evince some of the dynamics seen in adolescent individuals, particularly males, who exult in words, abstractions, and grandiose fantasies, and then have these abilities subside as interactions with the hard world ensue. Damon LaBarbera, PhD.