ABSTRACT
Victor Segalen's judgement on Rimbaud, which distinguishes the 'generalizable' as a criterion of poetic excellence, would doubtless be construed a misappropriation by many subsequent appropriators of that poet's example. Segalen understands himself to be living at the moment in world history when the world exists as a unified system for the first time. The establishment of the globe itself as the framework for the derivation of significant experience has become definitive. A key moment in the passage out of the 'mythological', as in all accounts of the Fall, is the emergence of the consciousness of separation. Segalen encountered and enthusiastically adopted an account of this development, written in respect of the thematization of nature by the Romantic poet Maurice de Guerin, by the critic Henri Clouard. The most apparent originality in the poetic works is Segalen's formal, indeed spatial, inventiveness in the pursuit of poetic communication.
