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"La révolution spirituelle doit se faire actuellement, dans une certaine mesure, contre Rimbaud."
"Un bon texte nourrit aussi la génération contradictoire."
- Francis Ponge.*
Since its first publication in 1965, Pour un Malherbe has stood as Ponge 's most explicit pronouncement of poetic affiliation, one in which the poetson wrests the poet-father from the hands of academia in an attempt to reintroduce us to what Ponge perceived as France's most important avant-garde poet.1 Nonetheless, Pour un Malherbe is not the first work in which Ponge looks to important poet-predecessors to establish himself as son and heir to certain distinctly French poetic traditions.2 Already in "Notes pour un coquillage" - clearly the most straightforward testimony of affiliation in Le Parti pris des choses (1942) - , Ponge mentions Malherbe, this time in the company of other, no less familiar figures: "j'admire surtout certains écrivains ou musiciens mesurés, Bach, Rameau, Malherbe, Horace, Mallarmé - , les écrivains par-dessus tous les autres." Nowhere else in Le Parti pris des choses does a poetic text so directly express Ponge's cultural parti pris, and nowhere is it clearer that those preferences will not serve to exalt the shock of the new, but will rather confirm the value of continuity. In "Notes pour un coquillage" - written just a few years after the death of Armand Ponge, the poet's father - ,3 Ponge adopts the role of respectful son, whose mission, in his own words, is based on the desire later expressed in Pour un Malherbe to "porter dans ses bras son père mort d'une génération précédente, le dresser et forcer tout le monde au respect de lui" (316).
But what happens when the father is no longer a figure of France's cultural elite, as was the case with Malherbe or Mallarmé, but rather Arthur Rimbaud? How can Ponge reconcile Rimbaud's self-imposed isolation, his self -fashioned "barbarity" - "si j'avais des antécédents à un point quelconque de l'histoire de France! Mais non, rien" (OEuvres 213) - with his own favorable view of family and tradition?4 To be sure, Rimbaud's dérèglement, what one critic has termed his suradolescence (Ross 49), makes him a particularly unusual candidate as poet-father to Ponge's role as dutiful poet-son as he expresses it in Pour un Malherbe....