Dear Log,
«Certainly, [Rimbaud's later letters] do not paint a complimentary portrait of Rimbaud, revealing an almost completely unreflective and mercantile -- in a word, prosaic -- man. Critics have tended to dismiss the second phase of his life, to pretend that Rimbaud in Africa was literally "someone else." No real poet, they worry, could have abandoned his art without so much as a glance back.»--"Arse Poetica: When Rimbaud was good, he was very, very good."
(Exercice for the reader: compare the dichotomy Rimbaud the poet / Rimbaud the merchant with the similar or dissimilar rupture Lautréamont / Ducasse.)
