'An interrupter, a collective': Sean Bonney's Lyric Outrage

Nowell Smith, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9840-2507 (2013) 'An interrupter, a collective': Sean Bonney's Lyric Outrage. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 45.

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Abstract

This article analyses the way that politically engaged lyric negotiates two opposing impulses—the expression of individual outrage, and a desire for collective praxis—through a reading of the contemporary British poet Sean Bonney’s ‘translations’ of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. First I situate Bonney within a tradition of radical avant-garde poetics for which poetry’s refusal of the instrumentalisation of language is crucial to its political content; what is often dismissed as ‘elitism’ is in fact the its emancipatory democratic moment. I then chart shifts in Bonney’s poetics alongside shifts in British politics over the last decade: the collective attains increasing importance in the wake of the financial crisis and the Conservative-led government, and in place of Baudelaire the observer of high capitalism Bonney turns to Rimbaud the poetic communard. Finally I claim that Bonney’s articulation of political collectivity takes place in language, as a synaesthetic dérèglement de tous les sens.

Item Type:	Article
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group
Related URLs:	http://ebc.revues.org/746
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	27 Jan 2014 16:04
Last Modified:	18 Jun 2026 16:23
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/47272
DOI:	10.4000/ebc.746

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