Rimbaud’s modernity: revolt, clairvoyance, vanguard

Abstract

In the XIX Century, there are two concurrent and dependent modernities that affront each other but at the same time have a mutual influence. While in Baudelaire modernity is a reaction against social modernity, it is an awareness of the present as present, in a relation to eternity, and it is also an example of the modern artist’s alienation, another modernity appears as a rhetoric of rupture, a myth of the absolute beginning, a conscience of its own historical role. It is the artistic vanguard, which aims at the transformation of art, firmly believing that the world’s transformation will follow. Here is Rimbaud site with his refusal of the old, his belief that poetry will be “up front” and that the poet is the multiplier of progress. Keywords: Rimbaud. Modernity. Poetry. French Literature.