A precocious genius and assiduous reader of Hugo and the Parnassians, Rimbaud held Baudelaire in exceptional esteem: "Baudelaire is the first seer, the king of poets, a true God ", he wrote. But he also had reservations about Baudelaire that were no less revealing: "He still lived in too artistic a milieu; and the form so vaunted in him is petty: the inventions of the unknown demand new forms". Rimbaud's poetic approach was analyzed in the light of Baudelaire, around four major themes: correspondence, travel, the prose poem and childhood.
The first lecture focused on the reflection of Baudelaire's idea of correspondences in Rimbaud's conception of a language "summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colors", as well as on the gap between their two sonnets, "Correspondances" and "Voyelles". Far from the vision of "universal analogies" that underpins the Baudelairean sonnet, "Voyelles", initially inspired by it, soon turns away from it to become the laboratory of a characteristically unbridled play of sensory associations.
In the second lecture, an attempt was made to bring the two poets closer together around the theme of travel, based in particular on two great poems, "Le Voyage" and "Le Bateau ivre". Following the avatars of the "unknown" crossed with this theme, we saw that "Le Voyage" is founded on an essentially critical, disillusioned vision and language, to speak of the omnipresence of sin and Ennui and the impossibility of finding the unknown except in death, whereas "Le Bateau ivre", embodying the sensibility of an adolescence barely out of childhood, never ceases to pursue it, even if it means reaching a similar conclusion.
The third was devoted to the question of the prose poem, a genre of which Baudelaire and Rimbaud are both founders, in this case in its kinship with the tale. Through a parallel reading of "Une mort héroïque" (in Le Spleen de Paris) and "Conte" (in Les Illuminations), both of which are narrative and present a sovereign in the face of boredom, we noted the kinship of the Baudelairean prose poem with a brief, intense and autonomous short story à la Poe, while "Conte", while displaying its generic belonging in its title, aims to thicken its seductive enigma through strategic muteness.
The fourth and final lecture compared the two poets' perception of childhood. In Baudelaire's case, this first period, which constitutes the foundation of every human being, is evoked ontologically through intimate recollection, aesthetically as the embryo of a future artist (the idea of the "child-genius") or ethically as the little man already embodying the inherent wickedness of the human being: it is always recaptured in a critical distance. In Rimbaud, on the other hand, for whom childhood is still very close, the critical dimension is coupled with a poetic one, as in "Les Poètes de sept ans", and the retrospective gaze is often mingled with an anxiety or a haunting of abandonment, as in "Enfance".
So, each time, it was less a question of noting the filiation between the two renovators of French poetry than of following their divergences or contrasts from a point of intersection, of measuring what Rimbaud owes to Baudelaire in his distance rather than in his fidelity. Rimbaud is a rebellious pupil, and his assimilation is always a creative betrayal.