When you read, as I read in the Victorian and Modern Poetics book noted below, about how the famous Moderns (Yeats, Pound, Eliot, in her telling) in substantial ways repeated the formulae of the Victorians (Hallam, Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Pater), and that both generations were still struggling with the dilemmas and ambiguities bequeathed by the Romantic poets (the status of the imagination; solipsism and objectivity; sensation, will and intellection; discourse vs. "the picturesque"; aesthetics and didacticism; etc.) -

well, I know this sounds awfully boring, but...

actually I draw the lesson that the vocation of the poet - & the techniques of poetry - are still very much in play :

& that there are a lot of interesting avenues a poet can take, if in an adventurous and problem-solving mood -

the game is poorly described by the ponderous & pedantic theoreticians of the day (& I'm not talking about Ron Silliman here : but rather of the philosophers & "theory" mongers) -

a panoptical, literary-historical perspective - from within the actual practice of the poets - is more helpful, maybe -

John Kinsella translates Rimbaud's poem "Larme" [tear] in the recent issue of Poetry magazine.

The poem employs a number of "conceits" to (simultaneously) narrate & conceal the story that young Arthur spent a lot of time in the woods, and that while he was there, he got drunk on sunlight.

The poem sort of jars with the book I'm reading about Victorian & Modern Poetics, which begins with a history of the dramatic monologue, the persona, as a technique shared for varied reasons by poets from Browning & Tennyson through Swinburne & Wilde.

Rimbaud as far as I know never projected a persona. He was a sort of french Whitman, apparently - naturally endowed with literary savoir-faire.

Poets of the 19th & 20th centuries (& 21st, I guess) assume various counter-cultural and bohemian poses - which are, paradoxically, very limiting. (C. Christ discusses this.) The mask, the dramatic monologue, the persona - for these poets - counterbalances the (bohemian) pose.

This is complicated, I know.

Hart Crane tried to juggle all these elements - but he seems pretty close to Rimbaud in a number of ways. They were both extremely tough, in an odd way.

Rimbaud rejected both the sophisticated, hypocritical, "dramatic" literary world of the poseur, & the Rousseau-ish romance of a narrated childhood. For Rimbaud, childhood was too real, too profound, too immense for sophistry.

I guess something similar could be said for Proust. (Proust prevailed against all the febrile worries about "personality" & "subjectivity" & "narcissism" etc. which beset the 19th century. He only talked about himself.)

Started reading an interesting (& nice & short) study by Carol T. Christ, published by U. Chicago Press back in 1984, titled Victorian and Modern Poetics. (Book was referenced in the Langdon Hammer Crane/Tate book.) Explores the extensive continuities between Moderns & Victorians (despite pervasive & very influential Eliot/Pound attacks on their predecessors).

Both literary generations wrote in shadow of the Romantics : that is, within a practice of poetry which focused on, & represented, a personal/imaginative response to the external world. Both were wary of the individualism and subjectivity of this approach, and tried to find ways to counter it.

Just getting into it. Maybe such a panoptic perspective will help me write some more mini-essays at some point.