Robert Greer Cohn

The standard work on Rimbaud returns to print In this proven study on Arthur Rimbaud, the world's leading authority on Stéphane Mallarmé provides a guide to the understanding and appreciation of Rimbaud's entire poetic oeuvre. Robert Greer Cohn begins with an outline of the poet's life, focusing particularly on a childhood and adolescence that produced astoundingly original and frequently exquisite works, the whole body of poetry by a writer who ended his literary creation in his twentieth year. Cohn's analysis, combined with a substantial introduction, weaves together the known biographical facts with major clues from the poems to present a coherent portrait of the inner and outwardly imaged world of the young poet. Cohn draws on nondoctrinaire and open-minded approaches of modern depth psychology and philosophy and, most particularly, on the dazzlingly integral cosmic vision of Mallarmé. The resulting unified view affords insights into the meaning of many difficult passages, especially in the most hermetic and resistant of the Illuminations. Cohn also reveals the early poems, which heretofore received little attention, to be rich in poetic humanity. He suggests that the seeds of Rimbaud's later development lie in these early poems, which provide convincing paths into subsequent complexities.

The Poetry of Rimbaud

Acknowledging his debts to numerous post-Hegelian philosophers or psychologists and modern critics, Robert Greer Cohn offers a lucid and swift-paced account of an original view of literature that bears particular kinship to the artistic visions of Joyce, Mallarmé, and Proust.

The Writer's Way in France

Gerald Gillespie

Professor Gerald Gillespie

Essays on various aspects of the work of the French poet Stephane Mallarme on the centenary of his death (1998).

Robert Greer Cohn

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