Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism