Georg Trakl and Rimbaud: A Study in Influence and Development

Abstract

VEN IF Rimbaud had not influenced Trakl, there would be obvious parallels between the two poets. Both came from respectable provincial families, and both rebelled against their middle-class background. In their addiction to drugs, their sexual deviations, and their inability to feel at home even in the literary community, their lives are obvious models of the poete maudit. Moreover, both experienced a short, intense period of creative activity followed by a sudden breaksuicide in one case, the abandonment of literature in the other. However, such comparisons are scarcely meaningful except as a part of some larger investigation in, say, the sociology of literature. For a more directly literary comparison, one could cite their common use of themes such as childhood and metropolitan life and the voyant concept (explicit in Rimbaud, implicit in Trakl's prophetic tone and in the figures of seer and magician who appear in his poetry) that underlies their work. But more significant than parallels of personality or theme is a parallel in poetic technique-technique in its widest sense, as an expression of sensibility and as a qualification and definition of theme. For, despite the fact that the revolutionary elements in Trakl's work have not been acclaimed as have those in Rimbaud, the technical achievements of the two poets are part of a single chapter in the history of European literary styles. A mere listing of techniques common to them would afford us some insight into the manner in which modern poetry developed from traditional forms. But comparison need not stop here; there is evidence of a decisive influence of one poet upon tlhe other, and we are thus given a unique opportunity to observe the waycomparable to the influence of Laforgue on Pound and Eliot-in which the technical innovations of one literature were adopted in another. Not that Rimbaud's influence on Trakl has remained unknown all