Discourse of the Self and Rimbaud's Lettres du voyant: Alterity as a Creative Dialect

The voyant letters (1871) attest to an ambivalence in Rimbaldian æsthetics imbricating Promethean with Orphic myths of the poet and transcendent with immanent views of poetry. This ambivalence reveals a tension between the poet-as-willful-creator and creativity as autotelic the latter suggesting the part played by unconscious mental activity in poiesis. This essay examines how Rimbaud elaborates the creative process with relation to its source in the seer letters. Aspiring to transpose visions from the unknown or unconscious into discourse, Rimbaud sought to objectify poetic language. Rejecting early Romantic subjective idealism, Rimbaud depersonalized and decentered discourse, formulating self as other. As the key to understanding the genesis of the creative act in Rimbaldian aesthetics and, moreover, to the sense of "objective" poetry, the celebrated dictum "Je est un autre" shifts the source of inspiration from without (transcendent) to within (immanent) and becomes a statement on the unconscious origins of the creative process and a figure for the heterogeneous voice of the poetic text. (AMP) (ERP)