Notes on “Le Bateau ivre” Rimbaud, Poe, Hugo and the “stammering prodigy”

Taking “Le Bateau ivre” as its point of critical focus, the present study takes an intertextual path in and out of the poem in order to account for its varying sites of poetic, ideological and political resonance with other poems and poets. Rimbaud deftly moves from the Biblical psalm tradition to an intertextual field dominated by references to Poe, Baudelaire, and Hugo — so that the adventure of the poem itself is tightly interwoven with the form and fluctuations of thought.