Extract
[...] Trick to outsmart the censorship issued by the repression of the Commune (sign of the porosity between politics and literature, and of the mistrust of politics towards the influence, and therefore the power, of the latter), but also a way not to restrict poetry to the political convictions of its author. Rimbaud's poetry, therefore, is more than political, as it invites toChange one's life». The Rimbaud's sympathy for the working-class cause, as stated in 'The Blacksmith', does not prevent the poet from positioning himself above this political cause. [...]
[...] However, literature has a keen awareness of the political transformations of its century. This follows an ambiguous rapprochement between politics and literature: the novel, the theater, but also poetry are, each at their respective levels, imbued with politics. This porosity between politics and literature is all the more reinforced as a new conception of the author figure emerges, who conceives himself as an actor of history. The poetic revolutions engaged by the monumental figure of Victor Hugo and that, more fugitive, of Arthur Rimbaud can therefore be legitimately questioned in the light of the political revolutions that traverse the 19th century. [...]
[...] Let's take another figure of the poetic revolution of this century: can we really consider Arthur Rimbaud as an explicitly political poet? His so-called political poems exist, such as "Paris is repopulated" (renamed "The Parisian Orgy", a term used by anti-communards to designate the insurgents, whom they considered to be wild beasts), written after the May 1871 episode: " « The orgies weep for their ancient cry in the old lupanars. This poem is followed by "Jeanne-Marie's Hands", written in praise of the communist women." However, if he rebels against the order of the Second Empire or against the Versaillaise bourgeoisie, if he offers his sympathy to the Communards, if he also attacks the established religious order, against which he reifies Nature (see "The Evil" or "The Sleeper in the Valley"), the Rimbaudian revolution is not so much a political as a poetic one. [...]
[...] This poetry, both close to political events and yet beyond, can be linked with the figure of exile of Hugo, an exile that lasted for nearly twenty years, which can also symbolically represent the position of the poet and the politician: both on the sidelines, geographically in Hugo's case, and committed, through his publication and writing. Thus, to the political upheavals of the 19th century that shattered the established frameworks and the meaning given by the divine right monarchy, there correspond poetic transformations that do not reveal well-defined and politically committed poetry, but, on the contrary, a multiple poetics that seeks to escape the control of traditional authorities, whether political or literary, symbolized by the State or the alexandrine. If poetry responds to politics, it does not withdraw from it. [...]
[...] From then on, the link between politics and literature becomes more complex. The figure of the royalist Hugo is overlaid with the figure of the romantic poet engaged not for the ancients, but rather against classicism, that is, the norm of the time, which can be read in the preface of Cromwell, true declaration of war against the Classics, as well as in his collections, of Orientals (1829) until the Contemplations (1856) or The Four Winds of the Spirit (1881). The Battle of Hernani, at the Théâtre-Français, on February shows a Hugo in struggle against the shackles of the classical system and the traditional separation of genres: Hugo writes, indeed, in the preface, that the ""romanticism is, in the end, nothing but liberalism in literature». [...]
