How should one evaluate the relationship of a poet with the Church, when his verse is either obscure or plainly hostile to organised religion? Especially if the poet’s surviving family vehemently, and even turgidly, promotes him as a model of piety, a saint and martyr – and one of the leading lights of modern Catholic poetry and drama venerates the same poet as a saintly prophet.
This real-life puzzle was confronted in 1917 by the Vatican’s redoubtable Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books), when it considered whether to ban the French writer Arthur Rimbaud, who still baffles readers in search of poetic meaning today.
