SOURCE: "From the Far Side of Despair," in Rimbaud's Poetic Practice: Image and Theme in the Major Poems, Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 201-22.

In the following essay, Frohock disputes the view—held by many earlier critics —that in Une Saison en enfer Rimbaud irrevocably rejected both the world around him and his literary aspirations. Frohock maintains that although Rimbaud condemned both the Christian tradition and his personal experiment with voyancy, he accepted the challenge of dealing with reality and searching for a new form of poetic expression.

Nothing could be more natural than that our time should have made Rimbaud one of its special heroes. We have been aware of ourselves as living in—perhaps living through—an age of anxiety, and identified him as typically anxious. The heroes of our fiction have been alienated figures, and we know that Rimbaud's alienation was deep. We have honored, above...