Mis-reading the Creative Impulse

Book excerpt: Building on work by Aristotle, Jacques Lacan, and Harold Bloom, Adrianna M. Paliyenko's richly textured study revises our previous understanding of Arthur Rimbaud's (1854-1891) indirect artistic influence on Paul Claudel (1868-1955). Paliyenko's analysis answers to critical readings that rely on speculative spiritual affinities and text-surface similarities in identifying Claudel as Rimbaud's artistic follower. She traces the two writers' development of the poetic subject, striving to map Claudel's "creative corrections," or revisions, of Rimbaud's work. In redirecting discussion of Rimbaud's work, she develops a Bloomian paradigm of how creative artists strive for originality by correcting or revising their predecessors.