Poetry as social practice: Rimbaud, graffiti, rap (Arthur Rimbaud, France)

This dissertation reads rappers and graffiti writers alongside Rimbaud, thus reinterpreting the significance of Rimbaud's legacy for the twentieth century. More than any other writer, Rimbaud configures for French poetry the problem of the relationship between the poet's craft and his or her social or political role. Rimbaud's legacy, however, has been read as a contradictory imperative: if, on the one hand, he is recognized as claiming that poetry can be an arm of "action," on the other hand, his decision to give up writing at the age of twenty-one was interpreted as the repudiation of this earlier ambition. The twentieth century read Rimbaud largely in terms of refusal or negation: "Rimbaud's silence" was assimilated into a view of modern poetry as a break with everyday discourse and the ideological and commercial pitfalls that it represented. This dissertation argues, contrary to this view, that Rimbaud sees poetry as continuous with social life as a whole. It argues, furthermore, that rap MCs and graffiti writers are the most compelling contemporary heirs to Rimbaud's notion of poetry as a holistic practice that responds to the mediation of language and social norms by institutions of social power. Chapter one considers Rimbaud's attempt to recuperate an artistic Jacobinism that was motivated by the Paris Commune. It situates Rimbaud's project to recover the militant poetics of Romanticism with respect to the task of inventing a poetry suitable for the new regime that nineteenth-century poets inherited from the French Revolution. Chapter two continues the inquiry of chapter one, by examining Rimbaud's representation of the post-revolutionary poet as the descendent of the Gauls in "Mauvais Sang," the first long section of Une Saison en enfer. Chapter three interrogates the possibility of a meaningful relationship between Rimbaud's poetry and graffiti representations of Rimbaud from May 68 to the 1980s craze of stencil graffiti. Chapter four turns to rap through an analysis of the strong claims that rappers make for their poetic "verb" and argues that rappers challenge us to find a critical language that will help us to articulate the social stakes of their poetry.