Rimbaud and the Ideology of Art for Art's Sake

The author examines French writers' aesthetic response to alienation from 1830 to 1871, focusing particularly on Arthur Rimbaud's growing distance from the formalist Art for Art's Sake dominant period trend. In order to stress Rimbaud's poetic oppositionality to the mainstream apolitical cultural movement, the parodic verse poem "Ce qu'on dit au poète à propos de fleurs" is analyzed in its historical context, and related to Walter Benjamin's marxist theory of the value of aesthetic signs. (V-GA)