Of Laughter and Smiling Lucretius, Sully Prudhomme, Victor Hugo, Virgil and… Rimbaud

In this paper I examine those passages in ­Rimbaud’s poetry where the French verb “rire” is ­constructed with a ­complement introduced by the preposition “à”. In the 1870 poems, Rimbaud is clearly influenced by Sully ­Prudhomme’s translation of Lucretius, which he plagiarized and modified on different points whereas I show how, in “Bannières de mai” / “Patience [­D’un été.]”, the use of “rire” most likely derives from ­Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue.