The Presence of Rimbaud in the Poetry of Tony Harrison

Abstract

The importance of the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life and work for the Leeds poet Tony Harrison’s identity and poetic has not been recognized in the scholarship. Yet, the identification is explicitly made by Harrison in v., where he identifies with Rimbaud the hoodlum poet, and is implicitly registered in ‘Ghosts: Some Words before Breakfast’, where there is an underlying preoccupation with Rimbaud’s poetic silence and the manner of his dying. This paper examines Rimbaud’s presence in some of Harrison’s other writings, exploring the significance of Rimbaud’s African years for Harrison’s first major volume of poetry, The Loiners, and his identi-fication with Rimbaud’s poetic identity as the white‘ne`gre’. I also argue that Rimbaud’s interest in Illuminism influences Harrison’s elegiac vision in The School of Eloquence and that Harrison’s highly visual poetic is influenced by Rimbaud’s aesthetic of verbal photography or ‘illuminations’. The importance of ‘illuminations’, in the sense of epiphanies and visions, for Harrison’s poetry registers the influence of Rimbaud and also of Percy Bysshe Shelley,James Joyce, and Walter Benjamin. Primarily, the essay seeks to illuminate aspects of Harrison’s elective affinity with Rimbaud.