“I have adhered to such of the older traditions as I find adequate for my most lawless and revolutionary passions and moods.”

Holding that inherited forms can carry radical feeling · Author's Word, Harlem Shadows, 1922

• Poetry
• Rebellion
• Tradition

“It is the non-conformers, the innovators in art, science, technology, and human relations who, misunderstood and ridiculed in their own times, have shaped our world.”

A late defence of experiment against the comfort of convention · Article, New York Times, 1970s

• Art
• Innovation
• Rebellion

“I shall be a worker… working now, never, never; I am on strike.”

Original: Je serai un travailleur… travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grève. — Rimbaud turns the language of labour and revolt against conventional poetic and social expectations. · Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871 (French)

• Freedom
• Rebellion
• Work

“You are a teacher again. You told me that one owes a duty to Society; you are part of the teaching profession: you are keeping to the beaten track.”

Original: Vous revoilà professeur. On se doit à la Société, m’avez-vous dit; vous faites partie des corps enseignants: vous roulez dans la bonne ornière. — Rimbaud attacks conformity and the respectable social roles he believed constrained creative freedom. · Letter to Georges Izambard, 13 May 1871 (French)

• Convention
• Freedom
• Rebellion

“Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me? No indeed. I am a poet, a wine-bibber, a radical; a non-churchgoer who will no longer sing in the choir or lead prayer-meeting with a testimonial.”

Rejecting inherited gentility in favour of an independent artistic life · Autobiographical essay, Poet Out of Pioneer (1927)

• Identity
• Poetry
• Rebellion

“Don't let this kill you. I have run away.”

The brief note left when she fled her first marriage for Horace Wylie · Letter to her mother, December 1910

• Family
• Freedom
• Rebellion

“There are conditions in which many of the poor exist, where humanity must be either rebel or slave. For the slave, degradation and moral death are certain; but for the rebel there is always a chance of becoming conqueror.”

Insisting that resistance offers dignity where submission does not · Preface to the third edition of Babe Christabel (1854)

• Freedom
• Poverty
• Rebellion

“I don't think I should have been a respectable lady if I'd lived in them days. I'd have gone off with anyone who looked like that. Daphne was a fool.”

Playful revolt against respectability after quoting Swinburne on Apollo · Letter to Helen Coleman, 4 August 1910

• Convention
• Desire
• Rebellion

“A new art form is always the expression of a new spirit. In painting the new spirit is rebellious.”

Linking formal invention to revolt of spirit · The Whistler Book

• Art
• Rebellion
• Spirit