Rimbaud, poète-pitre

This article proposes a study of Rimbaud’s “Le coeur du pitre”–a text long considered as little more than a sort of provocatively scatological joke, an obscene parody in ‘poor taste’ that Rimbaud sends to Georges Izambard with the warning: “Ne vous fâchez pas”. Vaillant examines and catalogues Rimbaud’s poetics of revolt in both political (e.g., the poet’s relation to the Commune) and esthetic terms (cf., the poeisis of corporeal dejection/abjection in the “Coeur du pitre”), ultimately suggesting that the polyphonic and creative negativity involved in parody is a key element in a coherent artistic project for Rimbaud.