“Plenitude of the great dream” Rimbaud, Ashbery and the ‘vision’ of the unknown

John Ashbery’s 2011 translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations came as a surprise for readers familiar with this poet’s work. A reading attentive to the presence of the Rimbaldian corpus in Ashbery’s 2002 volume Chinese Whispers shows that those moments where an intertextual other presence rear their heads are always also moments in which the poet not only carefully affiliates or identifies with Rimbaud and in which Ashbery’s lyric subject arrives at a tentative, searching form of self-recognition