Re-reading la femme poète: Rimbaud and Louisa Siefert

Rimbaud's well-known lettre du voyant projects that women, once liberated from their domestic bondage, will play a fundamental role in revolutionizing poetry. Striking a feminist chord, his epistolary call to social and literary arms challenges women's exclusion from the male-dominated poetic tradition. Rimbaud, much like his contemporary Michelet, ostensibly reveres the creativity of women. Yet Rimbaud's reading of the best-selling French woman poet Louisa Siefert (1845-1877) takes a phallocratic turn, restricting la femme poète to personal lyricism, more precisely, to maternal longing. Rimbaud thus overlooks dialogic voicing and figurations of the unconscious Other in Siefert. While Siefert may have inspired Rimbaud, he overcomes her influence by concealing her modernity. (AMP)