Arthur Rimbaud and Mayakowsky

I kind of like Arthur Rimbaud's poetry and writing technique. (Partly because I can understand it.) I also found it really interesting that he wrote his poems between the ages of fifteen and twenty and then stopped writing. I read all his work in our assigned book and I liked the first one which was called "After the Flood." I tend to like poems that talk about a specific time period like this one...he writes about what happens in that moment in time right after the flood and when spring first begins. I like when a poet can put an image in your head and you can imagine what he/she is imagining or seeing. He is a lot more "simple", I think, then Emily Dickinson and uses dashes (just like her) to make you pause when reading the poem, however not nearly as much. It's more like you are just reading the poem aloud and are speaking it. He names animals such as spiders and beavers, and things such as rainbows and flowers that would make any person think of spring time in order to create a image. You can tell throughout this poem that he likes the "excitement" of changing seasons, but once the season is there, he is bored and wants the change again. He shows this by saying "Gush forth, pond;-Foam, roll above the bridge and over the bridge and over the woods..." He now wants the change from spring to flood to come back. At the end of the poem he randomly throws in a sentence about there being a Queen that knows why the seasons change (I think) but will not tell him why. I probably can understand what this poem is about and what Rimbaud's other poems are about because he was my age when he wrote these poems and was also not an adult that uses highly educated words that I needed to pull out a dictionary or thesaurus for. When I can actually understand the poems I am reading, I obviously do not find it as boring and actually enjoy reading it. On the other hand, when we read Vladimir Mayakowsky's poem, "A Cloud in Trousers" today in class, I liked that one a lot too because of how exaggerated it was. It made it interesting on a different scale.