PORTAL RIMBAUD
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Arthur Rimbaud ESSAYS & VARIOUSLY...


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Page 2
BIOGRAPHIES & NEWS



TESTI BIOGRAFICI IN INGLESE
THESE TEXTS ARE IN ENGLISH

Primo piano del giovane Arthur
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Rimbaud fumant, par Verlaine

CONTENTS:




This one found wandering on the Web...


Jim Morrison
MORRISON AND RIMBAUD: PERSONAL DISCOVERIES


Through my research, I have compiled a list of personal findings which are invaluable when considering the influence Arthur Rimbaud had on the life of Jim Morrison. More than just a literary icon, Arthur Rimbaud became a pattern for Morrison to draw from at a very early age. This deepened interest Morrison had in Rimbaud and his life may be derived from the biographical similarities the two shared. Simply put, Morrison was infatuated with Rimbaud because the two shared similar life traumas.

Rimbaud and Morrison were both essentially abandoned by their military fathers and left to the highly religious strong-arm of an overbearing mother. For Rimbaud, this abandonment included a systematic sheltering from the outside world, while Morrison was also left socially undeveloped due to the constant uprooting and replanting of the family required by the military. This space left by a lack of male influence would later be filled by the admiration of a male teacher. Rimbaud would be influenced by George Izambard, a professor at the College Charleville. Izambard had a love of poetry, especially modern poetry, which was shared by his star pupil Rimbaud. This commonality began a friendship between the two. For Morrison, his male influence would be found in Ed Brokaw, a film teacher at UCLA, who frequently found merit in his cinematic doings. These influences, however, would again lead to heartache due to abandonment. Izambard decided to go to war July 24, 1870, and Brokaw became disenchanted by Jim's film class final and reportedly told him that he had been very disappointed. The rejection of Morrison's film by Brokaw got him dismissed from the school's film festival, as well as earned him a D for the piece. For Rimbaud and Morrison, this second perceived abandonment led to the creation within themselves of a natural distrust in authority and distaste for male superiors.

Another similarity between the two poets is the possibility of a physical or sexual abuse encounter in their past. For Rimbaud, it manifested itself in his poem of "The Stolen Heart" (or "Le Coeur volé") dated June 1871, in which the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud describes a sexual encounter, most likely one of sodomy which he was subjected to, probably, when he went to enlist in the military. For Jim Morrison, little more is known about the severity or nature of his abuse, but it is referred to in Patricia Kennealy's book Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison. Here she writes: "Shadowy references have been made over the years to an episode in his childhood of an adult whom he trusted (nature of abuse and identity of adult unspecified by sources), and his subsequent rejection and angry dismissal by the parent to whom, in his shame and pain and bewilderment, he had turned to for help." Morrison's alcoholism, womanizing, and drug use as well as his return to the Oedipus myth in his lyrics, may all be attributed to this unspoken incident.

Finally, the song "Wild Child" has not been used by scholars to make a connection between Morrison and Rimbaud. But in fact, Morrison's lyrics inject him into the life of Rimbaud. The line "You remember when we were in Africa?" lyrically connects Morrison to Rimbaud, and contains a sense of yearning to escape with him into the depths of another land -- far away form L.A. and the rest of the world. "Wild Child" stands as a testimony to escapism. Morrison's voice inflection and chant-like vocals seem to summon Rimbaud through a sort of musical séance and ask permission for entrance into the spirit world. The vision quest Morrison begins here is a rampant theme in much of the Doors' lyrics and Morrison's poetry. By acknowledging how this song and the biographical similarities play deeply into Morrison's interest in Rimbaud the poet and the person, we as readers begin to uncover more and more similarities between the two literally.


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RIMBAUD, MORRISON, BLOOM, AND THE "ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE"

Much of the world is familiar with Jim Morrison the musician. Much of the world is also aware of the "other" side of Jim Morrison: the alcoholic, the womanizer, the drug experimenter, and the lewd performer. All of these elements that the world are familiar with impede the discovery of Jim Morrison the poet. What if, however, the poet side in fact caused the darker side of Morrison? What if his past and his search for poesy led him to the alcohol, sex, and self-exposure? Harold Bloom's "The Anxiety of Influence" admits that the poet's lifestyle could lead one to the dark side. Bloom categorizes a poet into six parts:

1. Clinamen: the poet uses his literary influence as a road map up to where he/she feels the predecessor faltered and writes new poetry, corrective poetry, as a way to use the influence of the initial poet, but create a new sense of poetry based in the faltering.

2. Tessers: the poet begins writing where his predecessor ends. The poet essentially continues in the footsteps of his/her influence.

3. Kenosis: the poet seems to believe himself/herself unable to compete with the mastery of the predecessor's. The poet, so humbled, seems to renounce being a poet, but this is only after reading a poem by the influence in which poetry is renounced. The absoluteness with which this is done is not as concrete as it seems.

4. Daemonization: reads his/her precursor and individuality identifies a single element that runs through all of the poetry. This commonality may not actually exist in the influencing poetry, however, and can be seen as an attempt to destroy the precursor's uniqueness by way of generalization.

5. Askesis: the poet sacrifices him/her self as an artist to the spirit of the predecessor. The sacrifice is a separation from society and the work of the predecessor. This leads to poetry written with the influence of the predecessor, but in such a way that it is in fact different and original when placed in comparison.

6. Apophrades: The poet allows the reader to see a deep, devout influence springing from his/her poetry.

I believe that Jim Morrison was an "Askesis" poet. Bloom writes:


"I am making the suggestion (which I myself dislike) that in his purgatorial askesis the strong poet knows only himself and the Other he must at last destroy, his precursor, who may well (by now) be an imaginary or composite figure, yet who remains formed by actual past poems that will not allow themselves to be forgotten."


As a musician and a poet, Morrison frequently, referred to Arthur Rimbaud. "Wild Child" came out before Wilderness or The American Night volumes of poetry did. And it is because of the musical accompaniment to "Wild Child" that it is almost impossible to forget. I believe that in order to be a good poet, he had to move past his predecessor, but that the individuality as a poet he sought was marred due to his self-perceived inadequacies when competing with Rimbaud.

It could have been his feeling of inadequacy teamed with the stress of being a musician that led him to reject society and isolate himself. Bloom writes of this behavior:

"Internalization is the poet's way of separation. The soul's estrangement from itself is not intended, yet follows from the attempt at estranging not only all precursors, but their worlds, which means to have estranged poetry itself. Error about life is necessary for life, and error about poetry is necessary for poetry."

So, as Bloom explains, Morrison's isolation was a hope for him to write better poetry. This isolation also entailed "derangement of the senses" which Morrison would actively participate in through heroin, LSD, cocaine, and marijuana. This "derangement" was said by Rimbaud to open the unconscious and allow the poet to see images they had never had before and write about them. This internalization led not only to Morrison's addiction, but also to his death. Morrison was almost 10 years younger then Rimbaud.

Bloom writes:


"The final product of the process of poetic askesis is the formulation of an imaginative equivalent of the superego, a fully developed poetic will, harsher than conscience, and so the urzien in each strong poet, his maturely internalized aggressiveness."


I propose that it was this "internalized aggressiveness compounded with the disappointment of not finding creative inspiration in Paris which led to his death. He was known solely as a musician, and only recently has Morrison been seen as a part. He sought to be a 60's version of Arthur Rimbaud, but in his mind fell short. It was this lack of proficiency in poetics, which led him into a self-destructive, drug taking despair, which ended, in 1970, with his death in Parisian bathtub.


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Jim Morrison - portrait
WILD CHILD

Arthur Rimbaud makes an awkward appearance in the Doors' album The Soft Parade by way of the song Wild Child. Initially, this piece was released as a B-side to the Robby Kreiger tune Touch Me in December of 1968. Although the tune was not widely known as their previous hits like Break On Through or Hello, I Love You, Wild Child was preformed frequently by The Doors in concert.

Chuck Crisafulli, in his book Moonlight Drive: The Stories Behind Every Doors' Song, calls the Morrison-written song a "tribute to a creature untouched by the constraints of civilization" due to Morrison's extensive reading on "primitive cultures"(84). This interpretation, however, lessens the impact of Jim's final line "You remember when we were in Africa?" Although Crisafulli does attribute the line to Rimbaud, the rest of the song contains the same degree of influence, which is merely brought neatly together by the final line. If the listener pays attention to the words carefully, there is much more going on than one might expect.

Arthur Rimbaud, in his early stages of writing, found interest and inspiration in alchemical texts. Interest in alchemy is quite blatantly discussed in the lyrics of Morrison. Enid Starkie explains the importance of alchemy best in her biography Arthur Rimbaud. Her text reveals that Rimbaud was not seeking actual gold when he dealt with alchemy, he was seeking metaphorical gold. "His aim is not to attain moral perfection for himself alone, but to procure the mysterious essence and to create the incorruptible." The goal in uncovering this metaphorical goal is essentially "reconciling Christ and Satan and of cutting down the tree of good and evil in order to bring in universal love and brotherhood (161)." By achieving this goal, Rimbaud believed he would reach a God-like position in the cosmos.

Wild Child/Full of grace / Savior of the human race / Your cool face / Natural child / Terrible child / Not your mother's or your Father's child / You're our child / Screamin' wild

Morrison conjures up the image of Rimbaud and congratulates him on reaching the position he sought after so diligently. He refers to Rimbaud as the "savior of the human race" and "full of grace." This iconoclastic position has kept him uncontained by worldly restraints and made him universal.

Not your mother's or your / Father's child / You're our child / Screamin' Wild

The song then turns to Rimbaud's poetic device - the method of achieving ultimate bliss:

(An ancient lunatic reigns in the trees of the night) / With the hunger at her heels / And freedom in her eyes / She dances on her knees / Pirate prince at her side / Staring / Into / The hollow idol's eye

The recurring images of the forests at night, the freedom and comfort of the unnamed nature woman, and the sinister undercurrent present in joy, are all referred to here. The fourth stanza acts as a by-line to the listener as a way to notify them who created this world - the "Wild child," the "Savior of the human race."

Morrison then turns the concluding line personal; he asks Rimbaud if he remembers when they were in Africa. Morrison had been quoted many times as saying one day he was going to disappear and return to society as a businessman in a suit or run off to Africa, never to be heard from again. This last question gives him the freedom of escape. Just as Rimbaud sought to erase the world and rebuild it through poetry, so here does Morrison follow in the footsteps of his influence and escape into words to find a safe haven away from society. Through this the song not only becomes one of tribute to a literary influence, but also one of admiration for his ability to escape.


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Hi, Jim!
CONCLUSIONS ON MORRISON AND RIMBAUD

Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews, wrote of Jim Morrison: "By 1965, he was a listless maunderer, who had read enough reasonably cerebral literature to describe his depressions, written enough halfhearted suicide notes to call himself a poet, and grown tired enough of his poems to want a rock band to put them to rest."

I beklieve however that, although it cannot be said that all of Jim Morrison's poetry is inspiring, the poems that are good are very good, and despite Mr. White's “professional" opinion, Morrison's poetics did consist of more than suicidal dribblings. He manages not only to cohesively borrow ideas from his literary idol Arthur Rimbaud , he also takes the ideas and makes them into something new. Some skeptics like Mr. White may dismiss Morrison's poetry and attribute his good poems to dumb luck. However, it is not hard to fathom a young man with a 149 IQ, an amazing background in literature, and a college education writing some good poems out of the spectrum of "luck".

Jim Morrison will never be taken seriously as a poet until his works are uncovered and taught…







Rimbaud drawn by Patti
ARTHUR RIMBAUD & PATTI SMITH


Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden. making love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but it's much more. azure. blue pool. oil slick lake. sensations telescope, animate. crystalline gulf. balls of colored glass exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings, open as a cave, open wider, total surrender.

—Patti Smith, from "dream of rimbaud"


[contributed by Fiona Webster, with Encyclopedia Britannica as main source for biographical material and other commentary]

Patti Smith
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud (b. Oct. 20, 1854, Charleville, France--d. Nov. 10, 1891, Marseille), was a French poet and adventurer who won renown among the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.

Biographical notes:

• grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, the second son of an army captain and a local farmer's daughter; his father spent little time with the family and eventually abandoned the children to the sole care of their mother, a strong-willed, bigoted woman who pinned all her ambitions on her younger son, Arthur

• outwardly pious and obedient, he was a child prodigy and a model pupil who astonished the teachers at the Collège de Charleville by his brilliance in all subjects, especially literature

• published first poem in 1870; obsessed with poetry, spending hours juggling with rhyme; this firm grounding in the craft of versification gave him a complete, even arrogant confidence and an ambition to be acknowledged by the currently fashionable Parnassian poets, of whom he was soon producing virtuoso pastiches

• in his 16th year, he found his own distinctive voice in poems whose sentiments swing between two extremes: revolt against a repressive hometown environment, and a passionate desire for freedom and adventure

• on the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870, his school in Charleville closed, marking the end of his formal education; the war served to intensify Rimbaud's rebelliousness; the elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even hallucinatory

• got involved with revolutionary socialist theory and hopes for revolution; ran away from home to Paris a couple of times; was briefly in prison; then brought back to Mama in Charleville

• the collapse of his passionately felt political ideals seems to have been a turning point for Rimbaud: from that point on, he declares in two important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), he gives up the idea of "work" (i.e., action) and, having acknowledged his true vocation, devotes himself with all his energy to his role as a poet

• in 1871, on the advice of a literary friend in Charleville, Rimbaud sent to the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new poetry: Verlaine, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to Paris and sent the money for his fare; in a burst of self-confidence, Rimbaud composed his famous (and perhaps finest poem) "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat")

• stayed for three months with Verlaine and his wife, and met most of the well-known poets of the day, but antagonized them all--except Verlaine himself--by his rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity; said to have then led a life of drink and debauchery

• Verlaine and Rimbaud were soon being seen in public as lovers, and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine's marriage; during the years 1872-1875, Rimbaud and Verlaine had a tense, violent, on-again off-again relationship that apparently drove Verlaine into physical illness and mental disturbance; Rimbaud is said to have been cruel to Verlaine; at one point, in Brussels, Verlaine shot him; Rimbaud was briefly hospitalized and Verlaine went to prison for 2 years

• during this period Rimbaud wrote significant works of poetry: Illuminations (prose poems), Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell), etc.

• after his final breakup with Verlaine in 1875, Rimbaud wrote no more poetry

• he became a world traveler and adventurer, eventually setting himself up as an explorer and trader in Ethiopia, at one point selling arms to Menilek II, king of Shewa (Shoa), who became that country's emperor in 1889; his gift for languages and his humane treatment of the Ethiopians made him popular with them

• during this period of expatriation, Rimbaud had become known as a poet in France; Verlaine had written about him in Les Poètes maudits and had published a selection of his poems; these had been enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems, under the title Illuminations, and further verse poems, in the Symbolist periodical La Vogue, as the work of "the late Arthur Rimbaud"; it is not known whether Rimbaud ever saw these publications

• Rimbaud made a considerable fortune in Ethiopia, but in February 1891 he developed a tumor on his knee; he was sent back to France, and shortly after he arrived at Marseille his right leg had to be amputated; he returned to the family farm at Roche, where his health grew steadily worse; in August '91 he set out on a nightmarish journey to Marseille, where his disease was diagnosed as cancer; he endured agonizing treatment at the hospital there and died, according to his sister Isabelle, after having made his confession to a priest


Self portrait by Patti Smith
Rimbaud wanted passionately to be a prophet, a visionary--or, as he put it, a voyant ("seer"). He believed in a universal life force that underlies all matter, which he referred to simply as "l'inconnu" ("the unknown"), and thought it could be sensed only by a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to "see" this spiritual unknown, so that his individual consciousness might be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument. He felt he would then be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social progress. (He never gave up his social ideals, and intended to realize them through poetry instead of politics.) First, though, he had to qualify himself for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method: "le dérèglement de tous les sens" ("the derangement of all the senses"). Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of his senses so that he could attain visions of the "unknown." He planned to subject himself, as if in a voluntary martyrdom, to fasting, pain, alcohol, and drugs, even cultivating hallucination and madness in order to expand his consciousness.

In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine the form of his poems: if the visions were formless, then so would be the poems.

The Illuminations (admired by Patti Smith) consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world--an imaginary universe complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own cities--all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of hallucinations. His style is elliptical and esoteric, stripping the prose poem of its narrative and descriptive content, and using words for their evocative power rather than their their dictionary meaning. As one critic has written, "The hypnotic rhythms, the dense musical patterns, and the visual pyrotechnics of the poems work in counterpoint with Rimbaud's playful mastery of juggled syntax, ambiguity, etymological and literary references, and bilingual puns. A unique achievement, the Illuminations' innovative use of language greatly influenced the subsequent development of French poetry."

Rimbaud's extraordinary life, with its precocious triumphs, its reckless scandals, its unexplained break with literature, and its mercenary adventures in exotic African locales, continues to excite the popular imagination. Critics have variously endowed his character with the qualities of a martyr-saint, an archetypal rebel, and a disreputable hooligan. What is incontrovertible is the extent of Rimbaud's contribution to modern French literature. Many 20th-century poets were influenced by the Dionysian power of his verse and his liberation of language from the constraints of form. Rimbaud's visionary ideals also proved attractive; his "unknown," somewhat domesticated in the form of the individual unconscious, became the hunting ground of the Surrealists, and his techniques of free association and language play, which they exploited so freely, are now universally used. Rimbaud, the child prodigy who was so prodigal of his genius, turned out to be one of the founding fathers of modernism.

Patti Smith has been greatly inspired by both the work and the life of Arthur Rimbaud, in ways too numerous to summarize briefly. For a critical analysis of Rimbaud's influence on Patti's work, see "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance" by Carrie J. Noland, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1995, Volume 21, Number 3. An excerpt from this essay is posted below.



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Sahara Blue by Patti Smith
Critical Inquiry

Spring 1995

Volume 21, Number 3

Excerpt from "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance"

by Carrie J. Noland:


"The fact that [Patti] Smith chose to focus her largely successful 1978 album Easter on Rimbaud points first to the great appeal of his myth; Rimbaud, the countercultural rebel, provided young musicians of the seventies with a persuasive model of antisocial innocence. However, Smith's multiple allusions to Rimbaud's text-- her appropriation of precise features of his style-- suggest thtat there was something she found nourishing in the poetry itself. The case of the punk reception of Rimbaud (a reception that occurred primarily through the mediation of Smith) demonstrates that it was the linguistic strategies we associate with the lyric genre-- and not simply the myth of the French voyou (hooligan, punk)-- that inspired the work of both punk musicians and their avant-garde predecessors, the dadaists of the late teens and the situationists of the sixties. The situationists, a radical French movement of the 1960s often cited as a primary influence on the formation of punk style, understood their project to be in direct continuity with the history and evolution of lyric strategies, strategies pushed to their furthest and most disruptive extreme in the work of Rimbaud and the surrealists. "Clearly," they wrote in 1958, "the principal domain we are going to replace and fulfill [through action] is poetry." In a formulation that would be decisive for the development of punk style, the situationists suggested that the textual existence of the poetic impulse did not realize the full potential of its radically anti-institutional force, and that this potential could only be "fulfilled" in the realm of concrete actions or "situations." While claiming that art per se had been exhausted as an effective counterforce to modern consumer society, Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman maintained that the "discoveries of modern poetry" could provide a blueprint for countercultural activity, especially, if not exclusively, in arenas traditionally foreign to high culture.

Such a view, it seems, was held by Patti Smith and the punk musicians she influenced as well. However, punk fans of Patti Smith and of Malcolm McLaren's band the Sex Pistols-- a band many consider to be the culmination of punk practices inaugurated by Smith-- may not have known that the sound and style of the music they were listening toowed a debt to the "discoveries of modern poetry." Such a debt to combinatory techniques developed by high-cultural models was either muffled or advertised, depending upon the diverse packaging strategies of the musicians involved. While the music of the Sex Pistols would maintain an attenuated relationship to the poetic tradition, Patti Smith actually foregrounded her debt, referring directly to her major poetic influence, Rimbaud, and participating in a hermeneutic activity as she transformed Rimbaud's texts into her own..."

Patti Smith





THE FRENCH CONNECTION: TRACKING RIMBAUD’S INFLUENCE


by Ronald S. Kostar


The French have a special room in their Hotel de Coutoure for malcontents. Since Francois Villon, the first French poet and himself a convicted criminal, French culture has endured, and in all likelihood, been spurred along by, the noxious gases of its angry young men. Grumbling and cursing, spitting on the fine salmon-pink marble floor, are the likes of Baudelaire, Lautremont, Jarry, Artaud, and Rimbaud. Each keeps a respectful distance from the others, and all keep an even more than respectful distance from the latest newcomer, Celine, whom they all fear and secretly despise for having outdistanced them in their spleenful art. Otherwise, like the molecules in a cloud of green bacteria, they seem to get along fine, hating each other; and they are singularly delighted whenever one of their kind stalks into the hallway and insults the more proper guests.

Though strong enough to propel its own literature, the obnoxious influence pouring from this room is pure poison by the time it drifts over to the Americas. Most of the ideas and attitudes therein strike Americans as abhorrent: the harsh treatment of anything bodily with a reoccurring theme of disgust, are they not, for most Americans, a distasteful and very expendable relic of medieval Christianity? And what are we to make of their lack of sentiment that at times degenerates into overt cruelty, and their biting skepticism of anything that is not otherworldly. Cruelty, sadomasochism, fetishism, Neoplatonism, even Futurism - what could be further from the pragmatic instincts of most Americans, or from the concerns of American culture?

And yet, American poets and the artists of underground, and even popular, culture have responded to the discordant tones of these French poets.

One of these poets, Arthur Rimbaud, has impressed many American artists as being especially suited to the needs of modern culture. What is it that made Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of 19th Century French letters, whose meteoric writing career ended with his disappearance into Africa and his subsequent emergence shortly before his death, a powerful influence on contemporary culture?

The most enduring image of Rimbaud is of a brilliant, belligerent adolescent, lying in a park in his hometown of Charleville, indulging freely and excessively in the ecstasies of summer, alcohol and drugs.


During the summer of 1871 , when he was in full bloom poetically, Rimbaud’s anguish is the result of a series of severances from his family and culture. He is cut off from: (1) his family by a witch of a mother; (2) his fellow Frenchmen by occupying German soldiers fighting a war with France; (3) French poetic tradition and politics, since he had sided with the rebels in the Revolution of 1871 and spoken out bitterly against the poets of the day; and (4) by these fellow rebels, who physically abused him when he had taken up residence with them in their stockades.

From this point, Rimbaud went on to exacerbate his disaffection by further insulting the established poets of Paris, whom he had wanted very badly to impress; driving Verlaine, the one poet he respected and, by all indications, loved, to a point of despair until Verlaine eventually shot and wounded him. Rimbaud then stalked out on nearly 25 years of brutal traveling, mostly overland and on foot, around Europe and into Africa.

While living alone in Ethiopia, Rimbaud explored places where no European had been, gradually settling into the harsh, stoic mercantile life of a trader of, among other things, guns and men. He wrote no poetry during the last 19 years of his life and even his death in Marseille at the age of 37 seems to have been more miserable than most.

What many American artists, especially those coming of age in the 1960s, found appealing in Rimbaud was his radically disaffected attitude towards his society. Novelists, such as Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, have immortalized Rimbaud’s as a disaffected visionary, an image that has been celebrated and emulated by many writers and artists. The image alone, however, does not explain Rimbaud’s extraordinary appeal to modern artists. Fortunately, a record of his poetics remains and can be studied in order to trace his sphere of influence.

Behind the pose of aesthetic rebel, and the rebellious unorthodox life style of the dispossessed, one can also attribute to Rimbaud a truly original approach to interpreting sensual experience that envisioned and actually invented an alternative reality.

The most striking qualities of Rimbaud’s poetry are his extreme alienation from the social order of his time, resulting in a disillusionment with conventional language, and his unique portrayal of the senses as endowed with extra-perceptual possibilities that are capable of revealing new horizons of experience.

In a letter written to a friend, Rimbaud called this poetic the dereglement les senses; which is perhaps best translated as the rearranging of the senses with an emphasis on liberating their potential. (Synesthesia, “a mixing of the senses and sensation” is the English equivalent.) He saw his purpose as one of returning to poetry the immediacy of experience, intensified and enriched by a confusing and intermingling of different sensations. Rimbaud believed that this poetic would enable him to see and do miraculous, indeed magical, things such as see colors in the vowels, release fragrances, and pull remarkable visions from the commonplace events. As his early poems would show, and a prematurely-jaded Rimbaud would regret, by means of this method his life became “a fantastic opera,” and his poetry a kind of alchemy that transformed the poet himself into a “thief of fire.” Yet as we look at these visions today, many seem remarkable contemporary and others, futuristic and apocalyptic.

The Illuminations, for instance, contains colorful modern cities where remarkable events take place. Tenderness and love, which Rimbaud thought improbable in his personal life, are possible in these settings; as are heroism, song, freedom of thought, and movement. These cities are also apocalyptic, rising from the ruins of a collapsed culture. Yet Rimbaud revitalizes the Christian vision of a resurrected city, the New Jerusalem of Revelations, by primitivizing it and populating it with fierce images that combine pagan and technological elements. In the process, he created the image of savage cities:


Unknown music vibrates in towering
castles of bone
All legend evolves, and excitement
rushes through the streets.
A paradise of whirlwinds melts away.
Savage dance,
endlessly
dancing the Triumph of Night
And once I went down into the tumult of Baghdad
in a boulevard, where companies
shouted the joys of new labor
into thick air, restlessly moving
but never escaping those phantoms come down
from the heights from where we were to
have met.
What strong arms, what shining hour
will bring me back this country,
the source of my repose,
moving the least of my movements?


Urban apocalyptic visions are nothing new, and indeed reach back to the Bible, but savage futurism is, as far as I know, a creation of Rimbaud; and here one finds the first relevance of Rimbaud’s imagery in our time and culture.

The imagery of similar cities has become nearly a standard motif in American art, and is most vividly portrayed in many American movies. The image of savagery in a highly-technological environment has become a common as an evening news report of urban street gangs roaming in the jungles of urban America; and in the context of such a highly-technological, yet primitive, civilization, modern artists have rediscovered Rimbaud’s alchemy of sensual confusion that rearranges the senses and brings reality to the point of a hallucinogenic experience.

Poetic synesthesia finds, as well, a counterpart in contemporary music, where Rimbaud’s imagery pops up in the concerting of chaos that appeared when American Rock’n’Roll was wedded to the early rock-cabaret movements of San Francisco.

During the early and mid 1960s, Rock’n’Roll artists brought popular music to a higher, more serious level by experimenting with electronic gadgetry. Technologized American hippies were by all indications the first to believe in and exploit the artistic powers of technology to disconcert the senses. Musicians rejected the simplistic and lethargic lyrics of earlier innocuous popular music and searched for resonance in whining feedback, supercharged electronic amplifiers, and apocalyptic lyrics.

Suddenly, the use of technology made Rimbaud’s dereglement les sense a very palpable and immediate experience. This new expression was accompanied by a renewed enthusiasm of primitive revel, set in the futuristic ambiance of light shows, strobe effects, forms, amplified colors and strange perfumes. What has happed to Rock’n’Roll since then, sadly, parallels what happened to Rimbaud: after an initial apocalyptic breakthrough, the music and the culture, with few exceptions, abandoned experimentation and returned to commercial conventionality, winding back down to the occasional anomaly of Heavy Metal or Punk that mistakes an oral or visual effect for content. Experimentation in much of Rock’n’Roll died like Rimbaud, with little critical attention or acclaim.

Still, I think the legacy of the aesthetics behind this music, and the imagery it provoked, can be heard in the music and lyrics of Jim Morrison and The Doors to this day as their work holds up well under scrutiny so many years after it was created.

On relistening to “LA Woman” and “The End,” for example, one hears electronic music combining with Morrison’s raspy, desperate and eerie voice to create a series of apocalyptic scenarios. Bizarre imagery and Brechtian theatrics are at work and the effect, as Rimbaud envisioned in his poetic, is synethetic: the listener’s senses are attacked and asked to yield and expand. As Morrison revealed in the only book he authored, his artistic purpose was similar to Rimbaud’s in that he wanted to change himself and others: transform personality by means of verbal insight and sensual onslaught; or as Rimbaud wrote, the purpose of poetry was to “change le vie.” Like Rimbaud, Morrison understood that the purpose of poetry, and by extension Rock, lies in it cathartic power as a healing process. Morrison wrote that “the lowest and widest aim [of art]...is for the purgation of perception [for the purpose of] rewinning... the life source from demon possessor.” Morrison, like Rimbaud, was a Dionysian, descending into a phantasmagoria of images that he believed would soothe, heal, and purge in order to “cull a cure from ecstasy, revise the sick, and regain the stolen soul.”

Rimbaud at 16
Subsequently, Morrison’s work consists of the same combination of apocalyptic and primitive elements working for purgation that one finds in Rimbaud. In Morrison’s regrettably neglected book of poetry, one finds lyrics such as:



Stare into the parlors of town
where a woman dances
in her European gown
to the real waltzes
this could be fun
to rule a wasteland.



And:


The Negroes in the forest
brightly feathered
They are saying forget the night, live
with us in the forests of
azure.
Free to dissolve in the streaming summer.


The same primitive flooding and shaking of the sense, the same urbane post-apocalyptic savagery, the same tone of elegant desperation appears in Morrison’s work, as it did in Rimbaud’s.

In fact, a century after the French poet, Morrison seemed to have been riding the same wave of disaffection and alienation, and recommending the same “cure by fire” that Rimbaud had known and prescribed. But while Rimbaud’s poetry drove him finally into a stolid and arid mercantile way of life, Morrison was never able to control the deluge of images that accompanied, and perhaps accomplished, his freedom; and eventually he succumbed and drowned, ironically in Paris, while trying to get away from the “Rock scene” and establish himself as a poet.

Despite much stagnation or regression of Rock since, I think it is arguable that Rock music reached it high-water mark aesthetically just before and after Morrison’s era in the early 1970s; and that Morrison was one of the leaders in Rock’s breakthrough toward rearranging the senses. The use of synesthesia indicated both alienation and search for new expressions of experience in a highly volatile era.

The second aspect of Rimbaud’s poetic-his alienation from and animosity toward conventional language-foreshadowed a tendency of modern writers to disinherit the land of their time. Many modern American artists see, along with Rimbaud, that there can be an ideology contained within language that appropriates subjective experience into prefabricated units of meaning. Such standardized language accompanies sterile closed-mindedness that reduces language to formula and enslaves people by discouraging their own free expression of personal experience and feelings. This recognition, seen a century earlier by Rimbaud, is resonant in modern American poetry; and an excellent example of this tendency is exhibited the American poet Tom Clark.

Clark, in keeping with the attitude of literary modernism, takes the stance of an antagonist who stands off to the side of society, intoning in a voice that invokes the Biblical prophets as often as the shrill spleenful cry of the French. In one poem he represents himself as a sort of cultural gadfly, a self-proclaimed “pain in the ass” with all the charm and ability to please as “your average Sudanese mercenary killer” and yet, strangely, as morally vigilant as an Isaiah or Ezra Pound.

Yet despite the unusual combination of spleen and ethics, or perhaps in part because of it, Clark’s sense of awareness is acute, his scope is broad; and he recognizes himself, I think, as riding out the same historical wave as the two Dionysian poets, Morrison and Rimbaud.

Clark makes poetry while remaining in what he perceives as an increasingly sterile and stilted civilization. Instead of flying off into ecstasy, or descending into Hell, however, as is the wont of the heirs of the French avant-garde, Clark pulls poetry precisely out of his steady, uncompromising antagonism.

The picture he presents of modern culture is hardly optimistic. Foremost among his insights is that today, not only are people being overwhelmed with consumer ads and images at an alarming rate, but we also are being force-fed phrases, words, and other pre-packaged language for describing our experiences and feelings. Empty words and phrases like “relationships,” “interpersonal interactions,” “this is as good as it gets,” “have a nice day, and “you gotta love it,” permeate the culture, and, by extension, our thinking. With sarcasm bitter enough to win him admittance into the green room in the Hotel de Coutoure, Clark takes hold of the official manufactured language and turns it against itself, ridiculing it and at the same time magically transforming it in a new spiritually-satisfying context.

In the poem “Early Warning,” for instance, Clark peruses the West from a roof above the hills of Los Angeles (the quintessential savage-futuristic city), and echoes Rimbaud while growling at what he sees. He rails at a vast assortment of American foibles and vices: our false laid-backness; our compulsive work habits that lack either idea or feeling; our socialization and inevitable marketing of self improvement; our light-headed faith in science; and our groundless social optimism. Clark’s other targets include materialism, fellow poets, and death; but his most severe jousts are reserved for muddled language and for those who would use language for their own crass and selfish ends. Clark’s discontent, in fact, is so strong that this poem could well be re-titled “How the West was Lost.” Yet what is admirable about his work and makes it enduring is the complexity and multiplicity of themes that thread throughout and make it transcend language and literature. He takes poetry’s role in society seriously, and like Rimbaud, puts stock in the power of language to “clear up the air” and bring about personal and collective change. We are living, he warns in...


“...an age of linguistic collapse, when speech
has been reduced to idiot mumble
meaningless except to fellow perpetrators
of the mass atrocity against sense-”


in...


“silence which is least pure
like a nuclear blast-”


he proposes...


“to arouse
the race with thought and action is a higher
way. Only clear speech which
comes from
language in contact with emotion and
thought can spread the truth that brings
the pyramid of power down to pieces on
the ground...”


By comparison, Rimbaud described the urban sterility of his time as:


...a metropolis considered modern because all known taste has been eluded
In the furnishing and outside of the
houses,
As well as in the plan of the city.
Here you will find no trace of a single monument to superstition.
Morals and language have been reduced
To their simplest expression, that is all!
These millions of people with no need to
know each other
Lay down so equally the path of
education, of trade and old age,
That the course of life is probably
several times shorter
Than anything a crazy static sets up
for people on the continent.
And from my window, what original specters roll
Through this thick eternal smoke-
Our Crowded Shade, our Midsummer Night!
Latter-day Erinys fly before this cottage
Which is my country and the depth of
my heart,
Because everything here looks like this:
Dry-eyed-Death, our diligent daughter
and servant,
A hopeless love and a pretty Crime,
wailing in the mud of the
road.


Perhaps out of despair, like Rimbaud, at times Clark seems to be writing to a small, select, audience; an imagined, or real, American avant-garde. Some of his poems are cryptic, code-like as if he were trying to prevent them from being preempted or Xeroxed. Consequently, some are too esoteric, too subjective, perhaps too singular and precious. But other poems, like Rimbaud’s, shed light on and expose a cultural predicament. And although most of his poems start like Rimbaud’s poem above, with a daily observation, Clark’s work is highly analytical. The infrastructure-the threads running throughout the poems-are conceptual since Clark believes, I think, that concepts are more revealing and less easily domesticated and compromised than images. Conceptual reveries prompted by matter-of-fact observations are at the heart of Clark’s work, and the source of his analytic poetry is a Rimbaud-like disaffection in a kind of running argument with his country.


Those who came from places that produced corn, wheat, butter and eggs
to a place that produces celluloid images,
computer chips,
drive-in taco stands and aerospace
components
have never stopped wondering, “What am
I doing here?”
They believe this because somebody told
them so.
It’s a belief that’s really a lot more like a
feeling.
They can’t remember who it was that sold them
all those neon poems
you hear echoing through this cathedral
of empty
headed intentions they call home. The only false
note here is my referring to them as “they.”


Clark’s debt to Rimbaud is obvious. Yet Clark’s vision and voice is more sober than either Rimbaud’s or Morrison’s. Perhaps his analytical sarcasm will lead him in a different direction.

In any event, Tom Clark is the author of a massive ongoing work that deserves, if only for our own sake, to be read.

The search for new forms of artful experience spurred by the power of disaffection, resonant in Rimbaud’s poetry, has offered some artists of our era a model not afforded elsewhere in a Anglo top-heavy tradition. Strangely enough, the influence of the room in the Hotel de Coutoure may have found, if not an ideal, at least a suitable home in the highly technological and peculiarly primitive imagination of modern America.

Tracking Rimbaud’s influence suggests that, as we catch up with Europe historically, we can expect similar poetic responses to our experience; responses that are due perhaps less to similar temperaments than to an ongoing situation, which if anything, is getting worse for poets and anyone else who still values the originality of one’s own experience and the freedom to express it in one’s own words. As Rimbaud foresaw in his lifetime, mercantilism has brought on an unprecedented slew of not only things-commodities-goods-but has extended its influence even further into the marketing of images and words. Perhaps Rimbaud’s poetry still speaks to us because we are still riding the wave of mercantilism and alienation that Rimbaud rode. Beneath the responses of two very different American poets, Jim Morrison, the Dionysian, and Tom Clark, the conceptual antagonist, one can hear muffled the hopeful, desperate warning of a French visionary.







Rimbaud by Fernand Leger
"RIMBAUD" EST UN AUTRE

Jennifer Grotz

Book review:
I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud.
Ed. Wyatt Mason. Modern Library, November 2003.



There is a wonderful passage in Keats's letters in which the young poet takes a moment to describe his own posture as he sits writing to his brother and sister-in-law:


—the fire is at its last click—I am sitting with my back to it with one foot rather askew upon the rug and the other with the heel a little elevated from the carpet—I am writing this on the Maid's tragedy which I have read since tea with Great pleasure—Besides this volume of Beaumont & Fletcher—there are on the table two volumes of Chaucer . . . but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are writing to me—Could I see the same thing done of any great Man long since dead it would be a great delight: as to know in what position Shakespeare sat when he began 'To be or not be'—such thing(s) become interesting from distance of time or place. (12 March 1819)


Keats's remark articulates a common longing for those of us who turn to the letters of our favorite poets with the hope of a similar "great delight." There is of course the search for clues in the life and sensibility of the writer that might enable us to understand better how and why the poet wrote as he or she did—and for writers who read the letters of other writers, there is always a vicarious study of how another individual in "distance of time or place" models the life and conduct of being a writer. But there is also a hunger much more human and direct—the simple desire to know the poet, to see or hear him or her in a moment of intimacy or cogitation.

This being said, many readers will celebrate Wyatt Mason's new translation of the letters of Arthur Rimbaud, I Promise to Be Good, the second volume in the Modern Library Edition's Complete Rimbaud and now the largest and most complete selection of Rimbaud's letters available in English. That such a collection has not appeared until now may seem like a curious oversight on the part of the literary industry, for Rimbaud in some regards is a figure more mythologized and romanticized as the tragic young poet than even Keats in our tradition. And unlike Keats, Rimbaud's deliberate delving into the world of drugs and debauchery as a means to achieve his infamous "derangement of all the senses" has no doubt contributed to his popularity in mainstream culture and rendered him a veritable poster child for the figure of the "poete maudit," as Paul Verlaine famously named him. Fans of Jim Morrison and Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, are well acquainted with Rimbaud's life and works—and even literary rocker Patti Smith has contributed to the critical literature on Rimbaud with her recent Village Voice review of Graham Robb's recent biography of the poet. The myth of Rimbaud looms so large that a critic such as Geoffrey Brereton, who admits that "Everything has conspired to make Rimbaud, as person and poet, an almost incredible figure," nonetheless argues that although the poet's life and work remain remarkable even after "adulation and legend have been cleared away," that "there is no pressing reason why they should be. A writer's legend, if properly focused, is at least as revealing as any 'document.'"

Mason, in his absorbing introduction to I Promise to Be Good, argues that a more complete edition of Rimbaud's letters has remained hitherto unpublished exactly because the letters problematize the mythical character we've come to believe in as Rimbaud from creative or unreliable biographers, beginning with Paterne Berrichon, Rimbaud's own (posthumous) brother-in-law. Mason warns the reader:

If one approaches [the letters] with the expectation of salaciousness, with a thirst for literary gossip, with the hope of discovering hidden troves of unpublished verses, with a deep interest in Rimbaud's sexuality, with a hunger for the confessional—yes, one would be guaranteed disappointment. There is little of that register in Rimbaud's correspondence. Rather, a sober impatience running from first letter to last. (xxxi)

Mason is of course correct in the sense that popular culture's appropriation and distortion of Rimbaud's life privileges the view of him as a young absinthe-drinking bohemian homosexual devil, and he is also correct that in recent biographies in particular, this myth continues to hold sway over the very biographers setting out to be the first to tell "the whole truth" about Rimbaud. Nevertheless, Mason's injunction that we should find the later letters of Rimbaud's travels through Arabia and Africa equally compelling as his early literary and love letters seems almost prudish—and worse, somewhat off the mark on what the reader seeks in Rimbaud's correspondence.

For any serious reader of Rimbaud's poetry, there are two persistent and overriding questions. The first is the problem of trying to understand and appreciate the poetry of a young man who may have been the most precocious genius in Western literature. (The reader recalls here that the entirety of Rimbaud's literary production takes place over the course of about four years, from the ages of fifteen to nineteen!) And the second problem is trying to understand why and how such a poet abandoned literature—and Europe—in exchange for the life of a wanderer and capitalist-bent trader of goods. In the case of Rimbaud, what is infinitely more remarkable and impenetrable than myth is mystery.

Mason's pooh-poohing of our culture's attraction to Rimbaud as a literary bad boy is perfectly warranted. It is not because the tales of Rimbaud's early life—his repeated running away from home, his wandering the streets of Paris in utter destitution, or his intense debauchery with the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine—are not true; rather, Rimbaud's behavior during his period of literary activity was not so much nihilistic rebellion as heart-wrenching suffering. Nevertheless, only thirty letters remain to document this crucial period. The weaving, therefore, of historical background and accounts from Rimbaud's friends and family—still available primarily through biographies—remains essential to understanding Rimbaud's human and literary formation and to these newly translated letters.

For what is not fully apparent in Rimbaud's own correspondence is that when fifteen-year-old Rimbaud began running away from home during the summer of 1870, he had little choice. Months after winning prestigious academic prizes and becoming the model student in school, Rimbaud's prospects were ruined by the Franco-Prussian War. Shortly after his teacher and mentor Georges Izambard left Charleville, Rimbaud's hometown, to return home to Douai during the unstable wartime, major civic institutions, including the schools, closed indefinitely and young Rimbaud was left to his own devices. Though he tried to enlist to be a soldier like his brother, he was too young to fight. Through Rimbaud's letters, we can learn about his subsequent arrest when in desperation he ran away to Paris to become a journalist. He writes, for example, to Izambard from Paris on September 5:


What you told me I shouldn't do, I did: I went to Paris, abandoning my maternal home! I left August 29. Stopping when getting off the train because I was penniless and owed the railroad thirteen francs, I was taken to the prefecture, and today I am awaiting my verdict in Mazas! Oh!—I depend on you as though on my mother; you have never been less than a brother to me: so I ask for the immediate help you've offered before. I wrote my mother, the imperial prosecutor, the Charleville chief of police; if you don't hear from me on Wednesday, before the train for Paris leaves from Douai, take that train, come here and claim me by letter or go to the prosecutor yourself, beg, vouch for me, pay my debt! Do everything you can, and, when you get this letter, write, you too, I order you, yes, write to my poor mother . . . to console her, write me too, do it all! I love you like a brother, I will love you like a father.
Taking your hand, your poor Arthur Rimbaud

From Mazas

And if you are able to set me free, take me to Douai with [you].


And yet, the letter Madame Rimbaud wrote to Izambard regarding this incident, printed in Enid Starkie's (still definitive) biography Arthur Rimbaud, elucidates further the pressures from home young Rimbaud experienced that contributed to his compulsion to run away:


Sir [she wrote], I am very anxious and do not at all understand the prolonged absence of Arthur. He must have understood, from my letter of the 17th, that he was not to remain another day at Douai. The police are now taking steps to discover his whereabouts and I fear that before you receive this he may have been arrested once more. In that case he need not attempt to come home for I swear that I shall not receive him. It is impossible to understand the madness of this child, he who is usually so good and quiet. . . .


Only partly reflected in his letters, as well, is the misery Rimbaud repeatedly endured in his flights to Paris, his only chance for escape and possible success. Homeless and impoverished, Rimbaud repeatedly ended up in jail or sleeping under bridges or in army barracks, where it is almost certain he was sexually assaulted by soldiers.

Rimbaud's perception of having been spurned by his family, his mentor, the military, and even the educational system, as well as the disadvantage of youth and a lack of resources to forage a survival in war-torn Paris, all lend invaluable background to both his poems and letters during his literary period. All of this to say that Rimbaud's was not a usual teenage angst. As Mason rightly points out, "However much we may be like Rimbaud, his life was most remarkable for the ways in which it was altogether unlike our own" (xxvi).
All of this understood, one appreciates anew what does exist in Rimbaud's early letters, in particular Rimbaud's decision to commit himself to poetry, as evinced in the two famous "seer" letters written immediately upon his return from Paris in May 1871. Here is part of the first one, written to Izambard:


I will be a worker: it's this idea that keeps me alive, when my mad fury would have me leap into the midst of Paris's battles—where how many other workers die as I write these words? To work now? Never, never. I'm on strike. Right now, I'm encrapulating myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working to turn myself into a seer: you won't understand at all, and it's unlikely that I'll be able to explain it to you. It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that's what I am. It's not at all my fault. It's wrong to say I think: one should say I am thought. Forgive the pun.

I is someone else. Tough luck to the wood that becomes a violin, and to hell with the unaware who quibble over what they're completely missing anyway!

Although Mason's translations overall are lucid and generally quite splendid, his rendering of Rimbaud's most famous epiphany—familiar to most English readers even in its French original: JE est un autre—feels particularly clumsy. Of course, the exclamatory and somewhat ambiguous "seer" letters are difficult to render in English in part because Rimbaud is still in the process of conceiving the poetic ideas he's articulating. It is perhaps for this reason—as well as the relative paucity of Rimbaud's letters on his own poetic revelations—that critics and readers have meditated upon virtually every phrase in these letters like beads on a rosary. It is almost as if Mason in his translation strives to deflate the language in the "seer" letters, ones that he argues "can only be viewed as a very small fraction of Rimbaud's thoughts on poetry. . . . It is clear," he adds, "that in the absence of information, what little we have has swelled in significance for being the only thing in sight" (xxxii).

Other significant early letters include ones to Paul Demeny and Theodore de Banville, to whom Rimbaud sent versions of some of his poetry, as well as to Ernest Delahaye, a friend from childhood to whom Rimbaud sent personal anecdotes as well as engaging and playful drawings. And then there are the unforgettable handful of letters to Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's literary partner-in-crime and lover, letters which remind the reader of Rimbaud's extreme vulnerability and youth:


Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. I promise to be good. If I was short with you, I was either kidding or just being stubborn. I regret all this more than I can express. Come back and all is forgotten. It is unbearable to think you took my joke seriously. I have been crying for two days straight. Come back. Be brave, dear friend. All is not lost. You only need to come back. We will live here once again, bravely, patiently. I'm begging you. You know it is for your own good. Come back, all of your things are here. I hope you now know that our last conversation wasn't real. That awful moment. But you, when I waved to you to get off the boat, why didn't you come? To have lived together for two years and to have come to that! What will you do? If you don't want to come back, would you want me to come to you?

(London, Friday afternoon [July 4, 1873], 61)


All of these early letters regularly trawled by critics and biographers make up only the first of the twelve sections of Mason's new volume, and for the most part, these letters already exist in English in numerous incarnations thanks to biographies and various compilations of Rimbaud's literary works. Mason's true labor of love is to translate and collect almost all of the letters written in the remaining fifteen years of Rimbaud's life after his abandonment of poetry. These eleven final sections of Mason's volume cover a dizzying array of vocations and locales Rimbaud inhabited abroad. Taken as a whole, Rimbaud's letters chronicle a young man's astonishing talent that is inexorably wounded into a low-grade fever of despair. Although Mason admirably argues that Rimbaud deserves to be understood primarily through his own words, the remaining hundreds of pages of letters can in some ways be summed up by Baudelaire's admonition: "Tout homme qui n'accepte pas les conditions de la vie vend son ame" ["Any man who cannot accept life's conditions sells his soul"].

In the Penguin Classics edition of the Collected Rimbaud, Oliver Bernard dismisses Rimbaud's later letters—the ones in which, as he quips, Rimbaud exchanges his search for "philosopher's gold" for gold in the form of money—as "hardly interesting." "Even his geographical descriptions are of a strictly commercial nature," he writes (xxxi). Rather than uncover the psychology or logic behind Rimbaud's rejection of poetry after his composition of A Season in Hell and Illuminations, the remaining letters only attest more strongly to why we long for such an explanation. Any attempt to understand this conundrum requires a theory, as for example in Starkie's biography, where she argues that Rimbaud's primary quest was spiritual and that Rimbaud only rejected poetry when he realized it was an inadequate means to achieve enlightenment. Mason, on the other hand, theorizes in his introduction to the letters and elsewhere that the unifying characteristic of Rimbaud's life was a "constant striving" and ambition that Rimbaud transferred over time from poetry to the desire to earn money. While Starkie's theory more aptly describes and supports Rimbaud's poetic production, it fails to explain the remainder of his life after he gave up writing. Mason's reading of Rimbaud, however, privileges Rimbaud's life after poetry—which, admittedly, lasts much longer than the brief period of Rimbaud as a writer—more than it explains the inspired early output of a poetic genius.

There is perhaps another theory not explored fully by Mason in which the historical pressures and vulnerabilities Rimbaud was subjected to finally prevented or dissuaded him from returning to poetry. Whatever the case, it is as if Rimbaud had read and taken to heart the advice his own mother gave to Verlaine during a period in which the older poet was threatening to commit suicide after his tumultuous breakup with Rimbaud. Madame Rimbaud writes:

I too have been desperately unhappy. I have suffered and wept but I have been able to turn my misfortunes to profit. God has granted me a strong heart, full of courage and energy. I've struggled against adversity and I've thought very deeply. I've looked around me and I've become convinced, yes utterly convinced, that each of us has a wound in his heart, more or less deep. My own wound seemed to me deeper than the wounds of others and that was quite natural. I could feel my own wound but not those of others. And then I said to myself—and I see every day that I am right—that true happiness consists solely in fulfilling of one's duty, however painful it may be. Do as I do, be strong and courageous against affliction. Banish from your heart all evil thoughts. Fight! fight with all your might against what is called the injustice of Fate, and you'll see that misfortune will grow weary of pursuing you, and you'll become happy once more. You must also work a good deal and find an aim to your life. (Starkie, 282)


Earlier, in the first volume of the Modern Library's Complete Rimbaud, Mason employs the editorial tactic of "more is better" to determine his selections among Rimbaud's poetry. His defense of the need for a more complete edition of Rimbaud's letters clearly continues this editorial penchant. In his introduction to the first volume of his translations of Rimbaud's poems, Mason explains:


[W]hen reading Rimbaud, we encounter the occasional poem that may well be dishonest, bad-mannered, or boring, written in language that is lifeless, prolix, or painful to the ear. Rather than seeing this as a condition that can be solved editorially—by omitting bad poems, or by offering translations that seek to "improve" uneven passages—it is wiser, I believe, to view Rimbaud's occasional lack of good grooming as a unique opportunity to experience the uneven, vivid, and rapid progression of his verse. (xxxiii)


Mason defends Rimbaud's later letters as remarkable for their memorable descriptions of scenery and locale, but what strikes this reader is the extent to which the letters betray a person who has chosen duty over inspiration, who has chosen a self-imposed exile. Most of the later letters are addressed to his family and follow a predictable pattern of topics and concerns, from updates on books or supplies he has requested from his family to financial details and transactions to descriptions of weather or living conditions. What is finally so poignant about Rimbaud's later letters is the effect they have of estranging Rimbaud from the readers of his poetry. How, for example, is it possible that the exuberant writer of the "seer" letters later writes a certain Monsieur Devisme for advice on hunting elephants?


I am traveling through the Galla lands (East Africa), and, as I am currently putting together a troop of elephant hunters, I would be altogether grateful were you, as soon as possible, to send me information concerning the following subject:

Is there a special gun for hunting elephants?

If so, please describe it?

Specifications?

Where may it be obtained? At what price?

The nature of its ammunition, poison, explosives?


And while it may be difficult to understand why young Rimbaud abandoned poetry in order to begin a different kind of life, it is even more difficult to read the letters at the end of his life, when it becomes apparent that the choices Rimbaud made never led to fulfillment or happiness. After suffering a painful and traumatic leg amputation at the end of his life, Rimbaud writes to his sister Isabelle:

All I do is cry, day and night; I am a dead man; I am crippled for life. In two weeks' time, I will be better, I think; but I will only be able to walk with crutches. As for an artificial leg, the doctor says that I have to wait a very long time, at least six months! . . .


I have no idea what to do. All these concerns are driving me mad: I don't sleep at all.

So our lives are misery, endless misery! Why do we exist?


Thankfully, we don't have to choose between the biographies and the letters to supplement our reading of Rimbaud's poetry. That we desire to understand Rimbaud the man does not require defending, either; it is inevitably part of the tension of the reader's relationship to any literary author. If this were not so, Keats would not have taken "great delight" in imagining Shakespeare the man, nor for that matter would our culture's ongoing debate on Shakespeare as the author of the plays still rage onward. Despite the tendency to mythology on the one hand, despite the "death of the author" in the afterlife of texts on the other, the real people who wrote the works we value still matter to us.

While Mason is correct that this new volume of Rimbaud's letters will question the myths our culture has built around Rimbaud, these letters do not clarify the mystery that invited those myths. And yet these letters will empower the English reader to interpret Rimbaud's life and work outside of the myths and theories of critics and biographers. "And that is not nothing," Mason quips at the end of his introduction, alluding to Rimbaud's letter to Izambard that includes his early poem "Coeur Supplicie." This is not nothing, Rimbaud warns his mentor—although Izambard nonetheless mistakes as parody the poet's painful articulation of his mistreatment and abuse by soldiers in Paris. Mason, like Rimbaud, invites us now to consider what we might otherwise dismiss as unnecessary or impertinent to understanding Rimbaud the individual. He asks us to consider seriously and anew an important and singular life—and to reconfigure a legendary myth back into a human life again—one full of contradiction, desire, and frailty.






Arthur Rimbaud
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD

By Robert S. Robbins


Arthur Rimbaud, French poet (1854 - 1891). Rimbaud has always been my favorite poet and literary role model because he was the first self-styled visionary that I came across in my reading. My high regard for Rimbaud is based on a deliberate misinterpretation of his significance. I was attracted by the "myth of Rimbaud" because I needed a representative figure of a literary genius based on divine inspiration and not technical merit. William Blake would have served as a better role model, being a poet in possession of the visionary faculty, but my prejudice for modernity kept me from investigating any of the Romantics. The fact that Rimbaud's creative struggles have assumed the proportions of a timeless myth is well documented in René Etiemble's study Le Mythe de Rimbaud and many writers have retold the myth in new works of fiction based on Rimbaud's life story.

Rimbaud sought to cultivate his soul, to arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, to make himself a visionary. These do not seem like unreasonable goals to me. To "cultivate one's soul" is a fine poetic expression and beautifully expresses the intriguing notion that the soul is something that can be developed. Of course, you can only entertain this notion if you do not find your psyche to be completely opaque to you. It also seems reasonable to arrive at the unknown through a disordering of all the senses. The "known" is only known through the senses. The unknown can be found by exploring the unconscious mind where there is much that is not known to the conscious mind.

I believe every artist should adopt Rimbaud's ideals and seek the illumination of the soul. The poet should look within to find a heightened significance and then manifest that significance in his writing. The inspired poet dreams exceptionally well, experiencing miracles of the imagination, the visions Rimbaud sought and found at times.

Unfortunately, today's writers and poets are too closely associated with academia. The poet has become indistinguishable from the scholar and a new ideal of professionalism demands that poetry be regarded as a craft rather than genius. There is a new emphasis on the craftsmanship of poetry, an emphasis on its superficial aspects, and a disregard for inspiration. The poet-scholar values perspiration over inspiration and will often repeat the old cliché "writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration". Note that the figures may vary but not the disproportion. In Janus-Faced Modernism by Langdon Hammer, the author suggests an interesting sociological shift in thelness or other hardships. In 1880 he found employment in the service of a coffee trader at Aden (now in Yemen), who sent him to Harer (now in Ethiopia). He became the first white man to journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and his report of this expedition was published by France's National Society of Geography in 1884.

In time Rimbaud set up as an explorer and trader in Ethiopia, traveling in the interior and at one point selling arms to Menilek II, king of Shewa (Shoa), who became that country's emperor in 1889. Rimbaud's gift for languages and his humane treatment of the Ethiopians made him popular with them. He kept in touch with his family by frequent letters in which he constantly complained about the hard conditions of his daily life. All trace of his amazing literary gift had disappeared; his ambition now was simply to amass as much money as possible and then return home to live at leisure.

During this period of expatriation, Rimbaud had become known as a poet in France. Verlaine had written about him in Les Poètes maudits (1884) and had published a selection of his poems. These had been enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems, unh of Rimbaud's work expresses the arrogance of a very powerful imagination, one that feels capable of transcending poetry. I believe that Rimbaud did not so much abandon poetry, when it did not accomplish magic, as he gave it up in disgust with its limitations. A Season In Hell provides many clues to the scope of Rimbaud's inner life. In Night Of Hell he claims "I have all the talents". He also expresses extraordinary confidence in the richness of his inner life, "I'll keep quiet on that: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I'm a thousand times richer than they. Let's be miserly like the sea." And his statement "I came to find my mind's disorder sacred" is the sort of thing you say when you revere your imagination.







...another lost wanderer on the 'Net:

“I” IS NOT RIMBAUD


Much analysis has become standard lore by scholars of Rimbaud's works, especially regarding his prose poem, The Foolish Virgin, where a consensus has been reached, catagorically asserting that the voice of the aforementioned is undoubtedly given to be that of Verlaine, whilst the voice of the 'Infernal Bridegroom' is designated to be that of Rimbaud, but it is not a mystery of any sort to observe that such critics and commentators have never interpreted the works of Arthur Rimbaud on his own particular terms. Was it not one of Rimbaud's very first statements on poetics, in his Letters of the Prophet, that I is an other? - does such a statement not entail that not one of the myriad speakers in Rimbaud's poems is ever in the voice of Rimbaud?

Does he not elaborate further to his friend, Ernest Delahaye, against egotism - against subjectivity, against autobiographical writings? Does he not chide his former professor, Georges Izambard, for being a historical repetition of that very same, and very stale and human point of view that has been the cause of ennui in the French landscape of poetry for centuries? Does he not imply that poetry is not an everyday use of language, that each book of poems, if they are indeed to actually be poems, are a catalogue of objectives, of prophecies, of magical spells — that channelling the spirits, — one's own archetypes and that of others, — by writing with I is an other in mind, is exactly what in fact distinguishes the sacredness of poetry from the profanity of prose?

Could it be that neither of the speakers in The Foolish Virgin are that of Rimbaud? Or are we to interpret what he wrote not on his own terms, and be forced to falsely concede and warp his own beliefs as they apply to his own writings, by imposing a misoneism, — that what he wrote is nothing other than autobiographical? Or are we to say that his writings are autobiographical, and then be forced by the facts of Rimbaud's Letter to Paul Demeny, that according to his own definition of poetry, what he wrote was therefore not poetry, but prose?

And if neither of those two instances is the case, then are we left to concede that if the speakers in that prose poem of his are not himself and Verlaine, then are they none other than that of Verlaine, and of Verlaine's then wife, Mathilde? Of course we can, but we would be doing no better than to say that characters of The Foolish Virgin are the former, for to apply biography to fictional data is also ridiculously absurd. What a lack of freedom such a scriptwriter would have, how limited, were they only able to write from a human point of view, how obvious it would be that their work suffers as a result, and that such a writer is not as literate as the blank page requires them to be.

But if not Rimbaud, or Verlaine, then who is it that speaks in each of his poems? From whose heart and mind did Rimbaud express the poetic depths of in the pages of his Illuminations? Are we to say that such words that he wrote were all autobiographical? Or even biographical? Again, we would not be interpreting the poet on his own terms if we did.
And through it all, biographers of Rimbaud have recorded that at least a large portion of the Illuminations were written when he was in the company of Germain Nouveau, that same person who wrote to Rimbaud in Aden, two years after Rimbaud's death of which he was not informed, that he would like to join him in the hot climate, away from Europe, in unexplored Africa. Could it be that the speaker in many of Rimbauds Illuminations is none other than Germain Nouveau? What a far fetched interpretation, a chorus of quibblers might say, of course Rimbaud's poems are about himself, and maybe possibly about Verlaine, and nobody else, but about nobody in particular is exactly where interpreting Rimbaud's work on his own terms leads one to.

So if not Rimbaud, if not Verlaine, if not Nouveau, then who? Who is the speaker in Rimbaud's poetical works? For anybody that has ever been audience to a really exceptional music band in a crowded sports arena, it is not uncommon for them to say that when they were there, they felt as if something magical happened, and the lead singer was specifically singing to them.

Objectively, of course, they were not, but subjectively, it seemed as if that were the case, that every word that that lead singer sang somehow related to that audience member's life directly, and far more than it did to any of the other audience members there.

But in truth, the songs the musician was singing was in no way personally about that person in that audience whom that singer had never met before. Is that audience member insane?

Yet it has been one of the great literary errors of the 20th century for biographers of Rimbaud to say the same thing as that possibly insane audience member, but in reverse, — that in regards to the example provided above, such scholars would argue that that song was not about that audience member in particular, even though that audience member reported having definitely felt as if that song was specifically about them, and nobody else. No, they would argue that that song was about that lead singer in particular, and nobody else, that it was autobiographical.

But such a statement is equally absurd!

To say that all of Rimbaud's poems are about Rimbaud (and the songs of the aforementioned singer are about them and them only), is historically incorrect. Such poems are as much about Rimbaud as they are about any random person other than Rimbaud. Objectively, they are about no one person in particular, and it is only when viewed subjectively, that his poetical works can be assumed that they are about any person in particular, including Rimbaud. All truly poetic works have a mysterious magic mirror effect to them, where that which is read is able to be interpreted in a new and different fashion each time it is read, even if that poem is read over and over again by the very same person. It is of the utmost absurdity and a complete lack of professionalism for a biographer to pinpoint one imaginary instant in time by idolizing one interpretation of a poem over another.

Therefore, a disclaimer must be provided to each of those biographies. It must be said, that due to the power of art as described in the musician/audience member example provided above, that Rimbaud's poems are as autobiographical of Rimbaud only inasmuch as the poems of Baudelaire, whom never met Rimbaud, are biographical of Rimbaud, which is to say, that no really powerful poem is biographical of Rimbaud, whether written by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or anybody else, at all.






Hellish Season
THE MALADY/GREATNESS OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD

by Georges Bataille

[translation by Mark Spitzer and Emmanuelle Pourroy]

This piece on Rimbaud was found in the notes of Bataille. When Bataille refers to "the following text," he is most likely referring to the last section of "Etre Oreste," a section of his book L'IMPOSSIBLE.


Man's direction in life, as far as nature is concerned, is essentially negative. It goes from argument to argument and is made of rapid, quickly broken movements, exhilaration, and depression.

The movement of poetry arises from the known and leads to the unknown. If it is achieved, it touches on madness. But at the approach of madness, the tide recedes. Poetry is almost entirely a receding tide: the movement towards poetry, or towards madness, aspires to remain within the limits of the possible. At any rate, poetry is a negation of itself: it denies itself as it preserves itself and surpasses itself.

However, negation surpassing poetry comes from consequences other than receding tides. In approaching madness, the poet sinks into darkness. Still, madness does not have the means to maintain itself by itself any more than poetry does. Since there are poets and madmen--as there are monkeys of one type or another--poets and madmen exist only during certain moments. The limit of the poet is similar to that of the madman in that it affects one's personal life but not human life in general. These fixed points in time give shipwrecks the means to maintain themselves on their own. Thus, the movement of water around such shipwrecks is only a belated instant.

The following text indicates an awareness of personal collapse as well as the impersonal movements that follow it. It expresses poetry engaged in its own negation. But what touches on knowledge of one's self is simply desire, evocation; it's the void, the chaos, leftover from poetry. Any distinction can be made between madness (to which poetry succumbs) and the rational exhaustion of the possibilities of the being. Madness is masked by the appearance of a will for experience, and this will is disguised by a derangement. The inability to survive comes from excess of desire, which goes in many directions at the same time. The collapse felt during exhaustion keeps the mind from surpassing desire, and exacerbates it.

Failure is the measure of the wager. Exhilaration is the promise of depression. Poetry is denied by displacement. The poet is no longer destroyed language reshaping a false world through deconstructed symbols, but is the man, who, weary of the game, wants to make a real conquest from this realm of madness. What collapsed through anticipation, which the seer cannot see, is the difference between enduring collapse (madness, or its equivalent, pure negation) and searching for the possible beyond that collapse. These two moments merge into one, as with poetry.

Rimbaud's greatness is having led poetry to its own failure. Poetry is not a knowledge of one's self.






Rimbaud banner
THE BLACK FINGERS

by Jean-Michel MAULPOIX

Book review:
RIMBAUD SEEN BY PIERRE MICHON

à propos Rimbaud, the son, Gallimard, 1991

Translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder

* * *


Pierre Michon tells the story of the boy with the black fingers, with laundry-women reddened hands : And it's already with the choice of these very colours the profile of a strange boy being delineated and escaping at the same time. Michon doesn't indeed really tell such a story, he observes it surge and surrounds it. What have we still to learn today about the boy from Ardennes, but that very way he had come, never waited, demanded immediately from poetry, and left ? At what cost do words deserve to rime together ? Is the game of language still worth the candle ? Can living be something else than a mistake ?

Michon tells Rimbaud-the-derangement ; he doesn't add a few chapters to the traditional Vulgate. He comments it a little, and writes his own Gospel. Henceforth, he edges his way into the wrath of the difficult rascal, watches both Charleville and Paris with his own eyes and understands why it could not work long enough : it was a matter of verse one was expecting lights from that which would not be. It had been meant to fall short, useless and unbearable as it was.

Rimbaud carries on his face that kind of sulky heart which remains incarcerated within the poem. His countenance lodges its complaint. Having become legendary, his ill-tempered life indeed tells how tiring it may have become to dream one's own existence. And what is interesting for Michon is both this grumbling chap, as much as his beggar's bag of day-dreams. He thus becomes the provincial grand-nephew trying to explain the fate of the grand-uncle by groping about inside his own self rather than rummaging through his books.

For Arthur's story is quite an ordinary one for he who is used to pen-pushing : it is the story of a cantilevered life unable to find any place to dwell and settle. The son of a ghost and an anathema, Rimbaud never knew comfort and grew up keeping for himself far too much love. Hence his chronicle of a doomed character obediently turns to myth : he embodies the forces that compel a man to grasp a pen and sit beauty on his lap.

To tell Rimbaud's story means writing the genesis of one's own desire to write. It also means checking that one should not expect too much from language, that usurer. One day, just like that, you entrust her with your treasury in order to run freely along the roads and she never pays you back. You ask for food and shelter and she sends you someone who immediately fires you. You are never at home with her, you never leave unscathed from her black fingers, you are compelled to leave behind what you used to protect with both heart and faith. Any love language is set language, one has to put up with it and, as long as you can, try and pretend you don't suffer from it.

Rimbaud offers the example of he who would let himself be rolled like meatballs in flour by poetry which is both a matter of solitude and of cliques : it is quite difficult to find oneself out between heart beats and arms flourishes, difficult indeed not to leave behind one's patience after one's virginity. Michon understood it quite well : what is most interesting is not the Poet but what remains in the latter of a precarious and approximate man under his handsome school guise.

Thus does the boy from Ardennes ask the question of what may we exactly know about him whose identity is always magnified on the great Register of Literary History, hence neglecting his own finitude. What kind of a childhood doomed to die was really his life ? Two kinds of poems may exist : the latter printed on black and white and those which fill out the kind of hieroglyphics of the fate of he who writes, being far more encoded, riming and fearing. Michon, the biographer, uses all the patience of his prose at the service of this inaudible poem of that man made both of flesh and desire, with his black fingers of a laundry-woman's hands. He doesn't erect him any tombstone : for him he only inflates his voice a little, then lies down close to his sleep.






Rimbaud photographed by Carjat

ARTHUR RIMBAUD FROM THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA

b. Oct. 20, 1854, Charleville, France

d. Nov. 10, 1891, Marseille


in full JEAN-NICOLAS-ARTHUR RIMBAUD, French poet and adventurer who won renown among the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.


CHILDHOOD.


Rimbaud grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern France. He was the second son of an army captain and a local farmer's daughter. The father spent little time with the family and eventually abandoned the children to the sole care of their mother, a strong-willed, bigoted woman who pinned all her ambitions on her younger son, Arthur. Outwardly pious and obedient, he was a child prodigy and a model pupil who astonished the teachers at the Collège de Charleville by his brilliance in all subjects, especially literature. Rimbaud was a voracious reader who soon familiarized himself with the major French writers of both the past and present. He had a particular talent for Latin verse, and in August 1870 he won the first prize for a Latin poem at the Concours Académique. (His first published poem had appeared in January 1870 in La Revue pour Tous.) Rimbaud seemed obsessed with poetry, spending hours juggling with rhyme. This firm grounding in the craft of versification gave him a complete, even arrogant confidence and an ambition to be acknowledged by the currently fashionable Parnassian poets, of whom he was soon producing virtuoso pastiches.

In his 16th year Rimbaud found his own distinctive voice in poems whose sentiments swing between two extremes: revolt against a repressive hometown environment, and a passionate desire for freedom and adventure. All of the unhappy adolescent's loathing and longing are in these poems, which are already remarkable works. They express his disgust with the constraints of small-town life, its hypocrisies, its self-satisfaction and apathy. The cliches of sentimentality, and, increasingly, religion itself become the targets of fierce cynicism. Equally ringing is the lyrical language that voices Rimbaud's yearning for freedom and transcendence. Based on exquisitely perceived sense impressions, the imagery in these poems expresses a longing for sensual union with the natural world. These early poems are characteristically Rimbaldian in their directness and power.

Rimbaud had begun taking a keen interest in politics by the time the Franco-German War began in July 1870. Upon the war's outbreak the school in Charleville closed, an event that marked the end of his formal education. The war served to intensify Rimbaud's rebelliousness; the elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even hallucinatory. Reading widely in the town library, Rimbaud soon became involved with revolutionary socialist theory. In an impulsive attempt to put his hopes for revolution into practice, he ran away to Paris that August but was arrested at the station for traveling without a ticket. After a brief spell in prison, he wandered through northern France and Belgium for several months. His mother had him brought back to Charleville by the police, but in February 1871 he again ran off to Paris as a volunteer in the forces of the Paris Commune, which was then under siege by regular French troops. After a frustrating three weeks there, he returned home just before the Paris Commune was mercilessly suppressed.

The collapse of his passionately felt political ideals seems to have been a turning point for Rimbaud. From now on, he declares in two important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), he has given up the idea of "work" (i.e., action) and, having acknowledged his true vocation, will devote himself with all his energy to his role as a poet.

POETIC VISION.


Rimbaud wanted to serve as a prophet, a visionary, or, as he put it, a voyant ("seer"). He had come to believe in a universal life force that informs or underlies all matter. This spiritual force, which Rimbaud referred to simply as "l'inconnu" ("the unknown"), can be sensed only by a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to "see" this spiritual unknown and allowing his individual consciousness to be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument. He should then be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social progress. Rimbaud had not given up his social ideals, but now intended to realize them through poetry. First, though, he had to qualify himself for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method: "le dérèglement de tous les sens" ("the derangement of all the senses"). Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of his senses so that he could attain visions of the "unknown." In a voluntary martyrdom he would subject himself to fasting and pain, imbibe alcohol and drugs, and even cultivate hallucination and madness in order to expand his consciousness.

In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine the form of his poems, and if the visions were formless, then the poems would be too. He began allowing images and their associations to determine the structure of his new poems, such as the mysterious sonnet "Voyelles" ("Vowels").

MAJOR WORKS.


At the end of August 1871, on the advice of a literary friend in Charleville, Rimbaud sent to the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new poetry. Verlaine, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to Paris and sent the money for his fare. In a burst of self-confidence, Rimbaud composed "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"). This is perhaps his finest poem, and one that clearly demonstrates what his method could achieve. Ostensibly, "Le Bateau ivre" describes the journey of the voyant in a tipsy boat that has been freed from all constraints and launched headlong into a world of sea and sky that is heaving with the erotic rhythms of a universal dynamic force. The voyant himself is on an ecstatic search for some unnamed ideal that he seems to glimpse through the aquatic tumult. But monsters threaten, the dream breaks up in universal cataclysm, weariness and self pity take over, and both boat and voyant capitulate. Here Rimbaud succeeded in his aim of matching form to vision. A pounding rhythm drives the poem forward through enjambment across the verses, with internal rhymes and excited repetitions mounting on alliteration as with the swell of the envisioned sea. Images of startling vividness flash by and melt unexpectedly into each other with the fleeting clarity of hallucinations, and the poetic evocation of colours, movement, and the feel of the waters pull directly at the reader's senses.

Rimbaud was already a marvelous poet, but his behaviour in Paris was atrocious. He arrived there in September 1871, stayed for three months with Verlaine and his wife, and met most of the well-known poets of the day, but he antagonized them all--except Verlaine himself--by his rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity. Embarking upon a life of drink and debauchery, he became involved in a homosexual relationship with Verlaine that gave rise to scandal. The two men were soon being seen in public as lovers, and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine's marriage. In March 1872, while tormented by violent passion, jealousy, and guilt and in a state of physical dissolution, Rimbaud returned to Charleville so that Verlaine could attempt a reconciliation with his wife.

Rimbaud would later suggest that he was near death at this time, and the group of delicate, tenuous poems he then wrote--now known as Derniers Vers ("Last Verses")--express his yearning for purification through all this suffering. Still trying to match form to vision, he expresses his longing for spiritual regeneration in pared-down verse forms that are almost abstract patterns of musical and symbolic allusiveness. These poems clearly show the influence of Verlaine. About this time Rimbaud also composed the work that Verlaine called his masterpiece, "La Chasse spirituelle" ("The Spiritual Hunt"), the manuscript of which disappeared when the two poets went to England. Rimbaud now virtually abandoned verse composition; henceforth most of his literary production would consist of prose poems.

In May 1872 Rimbaud was recalled to Paris by Verlaine, who said that he could not live without him. That July Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and fled with Rimbaud to London, where they spent the following winter. During this winter Rimbaud composed a series of 40 prose poems to which he gave the title Illuminations. These are his most ambitious attempt to develop new poetic forms from the content of his visions. The Illuminations consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world, an imaginary universe complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own cities, all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of hallucinations. Within this framework the drama of the different stages of Rimbaud's own life is played out. He sees himself formulating his dreams; his discovery of hashish as a method of inducing visions is hailed; his ensuing nightmare anguish is relived in swirling images and convoluted syntax; and his love affair with Verlaine is recalled in cryptic images and symbols.

In the Illuminations Rimbaud reached the height of his originality and found the form best suited to his elliptical and esoteric style. He stripped the prose poem of its anecdotal, narrative, and descriptive content and used words for their evocative and associative power, divesting them of their logical or dictionary meaning. The hypnotic rhythms, the dense musical patterns, and the visual pyrotechnics of the poems work in counterpoint with Rimbaud's playful mastery of juggled syntax, ambiguity, etymological and literary references, and bilingual puns. A unique achievement, the Illuminations' innovative use of language greatly influenced the subsequent development of French poetry.

In real life the two poets' relationship was growing so tense and violent that Verlaine became physically ill and mentally disturbed. In April 1873 Rimbaud left him to return to his family, and it was at their farm at Roche, near Charleville, that he began to apply himself to another major work, Une Saison en enfer (1873; A Season in Hell). A month later Verlaine persuaded Rimbaud to accompany him to London. Rimbaud treated Verlaine with sadistic cruelty, and after more wanderings and quarrels, he rejoined Verlaine in Brussels only to make a last farewell. As he was leaving Verlaine shot him, wounding him in the wrist. Rimbaud was hospitalized, and Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Rimbaud soon returned to Roche, where he finished Une Saison en enfer.

Une Saison en enfer, which consists of nine fragments of prose and verse, is a remarkable work of self-confession and psychological examination. It is quite different from the Illuminations and in fact repudiates the aesthetic they represent. Rimbaud was going through a spiritual and moral crisis, and in Une Saison en enfer he retrospectively examines the hells he had entered in search of experience, his guilt-ridden and unhappy passion for Verlaine, and the failure of his own overambitious aesthetic. The poem consists of a series of scenes in which the narrator acts out various roles, seemingly a necessary therapy for a young man still searching for some authentic, unified identity. Within these scenes a switching of moods follows a dialectical pattern, pushing forward through opposite tendencies toward a third term that marks another step toward liberation. Each step is presented in highly dramatic form and is treated with detachment and a characteristic, cutting irony. The irony culminates in Rimbaud's account of his excessively idealistic literary efforts. Once these follies have been relived, the remaining sections explore different possible routes toward moral salvation. The cultivation of the mind, religious conversion, and other routes are each tried but then dismissed. In the book's final section, "Adieu" ("Goodbye"), Rimbaud takes a nostalgic backward look at his past life and then moves on, declaring that his spiritual battle has been won. He contemplates a future in which he can "possess the truth in a soul and a body." The enigmatic ambiguity of this concluding statement is characteristic of Rimbaud. Perhaps it implies both a saner, more realistic stance towards life and a healing of the split between body and soul that had so plagued him.

"Adieu" has sometimes been read as Rimbaud's farewell to creative writing. It was certainly a farewell to the visionary, apocalyptic writing of the voyant. In February 1874 Rimbaud returned to London in the company of Germain Nouveau, a fellow poet. There they copied out some of the Illuminations. Rimbaud returned home for Christmas and spent his time there studying mathematics and languages. His last encounter with Verlaine, early in 1875, ended in a violent quarrel, but it was at this time that he gave Verlaine the manuscript of the Illuminations.


LATER LIFE.


The rest of Rimbaud's life, from the literary point of view, was silence. In 1875 he set out to see the world, and by 1879 he had crossed the Alps on foot, joined and deserted the Dutch colonial army in the East Indies, visited Egypt, and worked as a labourer in Cyprus, in every instance suffering illness or other hardships. In 1880 he found employment in the service of a coffee trader at Aden (now in Yemen), who sent him to Harer (now in Ethiopia). He became the first white man to journey into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and his report of this expedition was published by France's National Society of Geography in 1884.

In time Rimbaud set up as an explorer and trader in Ethiopia, traveling in the interior and at one point selling arms to Menilek II, king of Shewa (Shoa), who became that country's emperor in 1889. Rimbaud's gift for languages and his humane treatment of the Ethiopians made him popular with them. He kept in touch with his family by frequent letters in which he constantly complained about the hard conditions of his daily life. All trace of his amazing literary gift had disappeared; his ambition now was simply to amass as much money as possible and then return home to live at leisure.

During this period of expatriation, Rimbaud had become known as a poet in France. Verlaine had written about him in Les Poètes maudits (1884) and had published a selection of his poems. These had been enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems, under the title Illuminations, and further verse poems, in the Symbolist periodical La Vogue, as the work of "the late Arthur Rimbaud." It is not known whether Rimbaud ever saw these publications. But he certainly knew of his rising fame after the appearance of Les Poètes maudits, for in 1885 he received a letter from an old schoolmate, Paul Bourde, who told him of the vogue of his poems among avant-garde poets.

Rimbaud did make a considerable fortune in Ethiopia, but in February 1891 he developed a tumour on his knee. He was sent back to France, and shortly after he arrived at Marseille his right leg had to be amputated. In July he returned to the family farm at Roche, where his health grew steadily worse. In August 1891 he set out on a nightmarish journey to Marseille, where his disease was diagnosed as cancer. He endured agonizing treatment at the hospital there and died, according to his sister Isabelle, after having made his confession to a priest.


ASSESSMENT.


Rimbaud's extraordinary life, with its precocious triumphs, its reckless scandals, its unexplained break with literature, and its mercenary adventures in exotic African locales, continues to excite the popular imagination. Critics have variously endowed his character with the qualities of a martyr-saint, an archetypal rebel, and a disreputable hooligan. What is incontrovertible is the extent of Rimbaud's contribution to modern French literature. Many 20th-century poets were influenced by the Dionysian power of his verse and his liberation of language from the constraints of form. Rimbaud's visionary ideals also proved attractive; his "unknown," somewhat domesticated in the form of the individual unconscious, became the hunting ground of the Surrealists, and his techniques of free association and language play, which they exploited so freely, are now universally used. Rimbaud, the child prodigy who was so prodigal of his genius, turned out to be one of the founding fathers of modernism.





Rimbaud's composition

ARSE POETICA

"WHEN RIMBAUD WAS GOOD, HE WAS VERY, VERY GOOD"

by Ruth Franklin - November 17, 2003



What poet’s life lends itself better to myth than Arthur Rimbaud’s? By the age of sixteen, he had written one of the most celebrated poems in French literature. Soon he was shocking bohemian Paris, living on absinthe and hashish and openly having an affair with Paul Verlaine. He wrote his masterpiece, “Une Saison en Enfer” (“A Season in Hell”), in a few months’ fevered productivity but supposedly cast almost all the printed copies into the flames. (When the allegedly burned books were discovered in the publisher’s archives a decade after Rimbaud’s death, the poet’s literary executor asked that they be destroyed in order to “give the appearance of truth” to the legend.) In the years that followed, Rimbaud wandered the globe, working odd jobs from circus cashier to African gunrunner. But he never wrote another word.

Normally, a poet’s work proves a useful antidote to the mythologizing tendency, but the material that Rimbaud left behind is both limited and ambiguous. His complete works—fewer than a hundred short poems, the seven-thousand-word prose text “Une Saison en Enfer,” and the prose poems known as the Illuminations, as well as approximately two hundred and fifty letters and a handful of other texts—barely fill two volumes. The poetry ranges from inspired to truly puerile; many of the letters contain outright lies, while others are fragmented or of dubious authenticity. Secondary sources present additional problems: the memoirs of Rimbaud’s relatives, friends, and ex-friends are a cacophony of quarrels, often apocryphal, while critics have tended to use him as a mirror for their own preoccupations. In the words of the biographer Graham Robb, he has been resurrected as “Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat poet, student revolutionary, rock lyricist, gay pioneer, and inspired drug-user,” and invoked by artists from Picasso to Jim Morrison. Yet the crucial questions about Rimbaud’s life and work remain unanswered: How could he write poetry like this at such a young age? And why did he give it up?

The past few years have seen a proliferation of works that strive to give a fuller treatment of Rimbaud. In addition to Robb’s biography—the most exhaustive study published in English in more than fifty years—there is now the Modern Library’s “Rimbaud Complete,” translated and edited by Wyatt Mason. The bilingual first volume, which was published last year, includes all of Rimbaud’s poetry as well as uncollected writings ranging from Latin school compositions to fragments of poems reconstructed by his acquaintances. This is now joined by “I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud,” the largest sampling of the poet’s correspondence yet to appear in English. In his introduction to this second volume, Mason argues that the letters act as a corrective, serving to “muddle the sexy myth by clarifying the sober man.” They may clarify all too much. Not only do the letters reveal that Rimbaud could often be obnoxious and demanding; worse, they show that after he stopped writing poetry he apparently never gave it another thought. Camus once wrote, “To sustain the legend, one has to be unaware of these decisive letters,” and concluded that “they are sacrilege, as the truth sometimes is.”
The legend begins at the moment of Rimbaud’s birth on October 20, 1854, in the small town of Charleville. Some say he was born with his eyes open, as a sign of the seer that he would become; others claim that the future traveller surprised the midwife by crawling toward the door. As a child, Rimbaud showed little interest in the usual boyhood pursuits, but his school compositions earned him a reputation for genius. Entering a regional poetry contest at the age of fifteen, he slept through the first three hours, then he had breakfast brought to him, and, handing in his poem as time was called, won the competition.

Rimbaud’s first few surviving letters date from about this time. From the start, they demonstrate the peculiar mixture of peremptoriness and ingratiation that would characterize his relationships throughout his life. Even on a scribbled note to his teacher Georges Izambard, Rimbaud’s flair for the dramatic is apparent, his handwriting full of swirls and flourishes. Writing a few months later to the poet Théodore de Banville, the editor of the anthology “Le Parnasse Contemporain,” he is both self-deprecating and infatuated with his own promise. “Cher Maître,” he wrote, “Try to keep a straight face while reading my poems: You would make me ridiculously happy and hopeful were you, Maître, to see if a little room were found for [them] among the Parnassians. . . . Ambition! Such madness!”

Enclosed were three samples of the fifteen-year-old’s latest work, among them “Sensation”:


Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature—as happily as with a woman.


Like Monet’s “Impression: Sunrise,” the painting that launched the Impressionist movement just a few years later, this miniature lyric distills the works of its antecedents in an altogether original way. The use of “blue” to describe the summer nights (an early draft had the more conventional “fine”) looks ahead to the surrealist Rimbaud of the next few years; the lines that follow, with their emphasis on what the speaker feels rather than on what he sees, submerge the clichés of the Parnassians’ nature poetry in an ecstasy of sensuality.

In May, 1871, Rimbaud wrote the two letters that have come to be known as the “Lettres du Voyant” (“Seer Letters”)—the only explicit statements of his poetic credo. The first, addressed to Izambard, begins by insulting the teacher’s “dry-as-dust subjective poetry” and includes a singsong ditty that crudely depicts anal intercourse. “Right now, I’m encrapulating myself as much as possible,” the sixteen-year-old wrote. (Mason here substitutes a cognate for Rimbaud’s coinage “je m’encrapule,” which actually makes the poet sound overly scatological; others have translated it as “making myself scummy” or “lousing myself up.”) “Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer. . . . It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. . . . I is someone else” (“Je est un autre”). The second letter, sent to Izambard’s friend Paul Demeny, repeats and elaborates on the soon-to-be-famous pronouncement. “The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it,” Rimbaud wrote. “The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved, and logical derangement of all the senses Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains.” Much has been made of the fact that Rimbaud added the qualifiers “long, involved, and logical” to this second call for the “derangement of all the senses,” nudging at the doors of perception rather than battering them down. But the sense is much the same: Rimbaud intends to turn his psyche inside out, to undergo whatever spiritual, emotional, and physical tests he can devise. “Je” becomes “un autre” by deconstructing what it means to be “Je.”

Rimbaud could not manage this on his own. In September, 1871, he again sought a patron, writing to Paul Verlaine, whose poetry he knew and admired, with a sampling of his latest work. “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote back. “We await you; we desire you.” Rimbaud’s train fare to Paris was enclosed.

The twenty-seven-year-old Verlaine was an alcoholic, a “dilettante homosexual” (as one Rimbaud biographer calls him), and a violent man who repeatedly assaulted his pregnant bride, Mathilde. The introduction of Rimbaud into the household caused additional strain, and Verlaine was forced to find lodging for him among friends. Rimbaud’s odd behavior (one of his hosts discovered him naked on the rooftop, hurling his clothes onto the street) and horrific personal hygiene earned him a reputation as a difficult house guest. At a gathering of the group of poets known as the Vilains Bonshommes (Nasty Fellows), he interrupted one poet’s reading by yelling “Merde!” at the end of every line, and stabbed another with a small sword. But, even as Verlaine’s friends were appalled by these pranks, copies of the extraordinary “Le Bateau Ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”), soon to become Rimbaud’s most famous poem, were circulating among them. “Unless this is one of fate’s nasty little tricks, we are witnessing the birth of a genius,” one of the Nasty Fellows commented.

“Le Bateau Ivre” begins, somewhat abruptly, in the voice of the boat. (Banville’s suggestion that Rimbaud should have started more conventionally, with a simile—“I am like a drunken boat”—drew a scornful response.) Its crew killed by “yawping Redskins,” it is free to wander the seas on its own: “Sweeter than sour apples are to infants / Were the green waters my pine hull drank.” Few geographic features mark the boat’s course; instead, its journey is described solely in images: “the low sun stained with mystic horror,” “green nights ablaze with snow,” “blue and yellow heavings of phosphorescent song!” The boat begins to disintegrate, and the visions grow darker: “solar lichen and gobs / Of azure snot,” “a lunatic plank escorted by black seahorses.” Finally, with a triumphant cry—“Let my hull burst! Let me sink into the sea!”—the boat breaks up:


Bathed in your weary waves, I can no longer ride
In the wake of cargo ships of cotton,
Nor cross the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim beneath the killing stares of prison ships.


This poem has been interpreted as everything from a pre-Freudian expression of the poet’s longing for his absent father to a chronicle of drug-induced hallucinations. What can’t be debated is Rimbaud’s musical ear for the assonances and long, open vowels of French. He famously celebrated these sounds in the sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”), which, influenced by contemporary theories about synesthesia, assigns a color to each one: “Black A, White E, Red I, Green U, Blue O.”

Anyone who knows Rimbaud’s work only from anthologies will be quite surprised to learn what else he was writing in Paris, especially once he installed himself among the group of artists known as the Zutistes (from “zut,” meaning “damn”). His contributions to the group’s communal journal are mainly parodies of other poets, including one co-written with Verlaine titled “Sonnet to an Asshole”: “Dark and wrinkled like a violet carnation / It breathes, humbly lurking in moss.” Rimbaud may have written one of the most melodious and visionary poems in the language, but he also had a wicked gift for obscene pastiche.

In the summer of 1872, Verlaine and Rimbaud ran away together for the first time, inaugurating a tumultuous series of meetings and partings. This first idyll lasted only a few weeks before Verlaine returned to his wife, but by September they were together again, this time in London. They walked around the city, read at the British Museum, and placed newspaper ads seeking work as tutors: “Leçons de Français, Latin, Littérature, en français, par deux Gentlemen Parisiens.” Rimbaud probably wrote much of the Illuminations in London, and during a visit home he began “Une Saison en Enfer.”

Both works are written in prose—mainly—but otherwise very little connects them. “Une Saison en Enfer” is narrated in a highly dramatic voice that takes on multiple personas. It presents itself as a confessional account of the speaker’s sojourn among the condemned, but the story it tells is deliberately cryptic. “Dear Satan,” the narrator exhorts early on, “you who so delight in a writer’s inability to describe or inform—watch me tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.” Given Rimbaud’s later years in Africa, it can be tempting to find the seeds of his wanderlust in the many references to journeys. “My day is done: I’m leaving Europe,” the speaker announces at one point. “The marine air will burn my lungs; unknown climates will tan my skin.” More popular, but almost as preposterous, is the reading of “Une Saison en Enfer” as a demonic diary of Rimbaud’s relationship with Verlaine. This interpretation rests largely on the section called “Foolish Virgin.” “He was very nearly a child,” this character (presumably Verlaine) says of the Hellish Husband. “His mysterious ways seduced me. . . . He’s doubtless a demon, for he is certainly not a man.” Finally, the poem has been read as Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry, even though some of the Illuminations postdate it. In the section titled “Alchemy of the Word,” Rimbaud presents a version of his poetic manifesto. “I invented colors for vowels!” the speaker exults. “I regulated the shape and movement of every consonant, and . . . flattered myself with the belief that I had invented a poetic language that, one day or another, would be understood by everyone, and that I alone would translate.” By the end of the poem, though, it seems clear that Rimbaud is rejecting love, not writing. “Why was I seeking a friendly hand? I have an advantage now: I can laugh off truthless loves, and strike down duplicitous couples with shame . . . and now I’ll be able to possess truth in a single body and soul.” This is a hymn to a new self-sufficiency, but Rimbaud himself did not yet seem to know what he would do with it.

The Illuminations, a grouping of some forty prose poems on subjects ranging from a circus sideshow to city life, overlap chronologically with “Une Saison en Enfer”; most of them were probably written between 1872 and 1874, though possibly later. Within the space of only a few years, Rimbaud had moved from the exquisite patterning of “Sensation” and “Le Bateau Ivre” to this far looser, more imagistic form. Some of the poems seem vaguely descriptive of Rimbaud’s time in London, but the collection resists an overarching framework even more strenuously than does “Une Saison en Enfer.” They are united only by their style: a series of images as tactile as they are visionary—“seraphic centauresses,” “harvested flowers as big as guns and goblets,” “a Baghdad boulevard where groups were singing joyously”—and often summed up by an oracular last line. “What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of you now will remain.”

The relationship between the two poets ended in chaos. One of the few surviving letters from Rimbaud to Verlaine (much of their correspondence was destroyed by Mathilde), dated July 4, 1873, reveals an unusually abject Rimbaud alone in London; Verlaine has returned once more to his wife. “Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. I promise to be good,” the letter opens, and ends, “My life is yours.” Verlaine responded with a telegram summoning Rimbaud to Brussels.They quarrelled for a few days, and then Verlaine went out, bought a gun, and returned drunk. When Rimbaud said he intended to return to Paris, Verlaine shot him in the arm. Verlaine was arrested and subjected to a humiliating examination at the hands of the police doctors, who stated in their report that his body showed “traces of habitual pederasty.” He was sentenced to two years in prison. Rimbaud saw him only once more, in early 1875, after Verlaine’s conversion to Christianity. “Verlaine arrived here the other day, clutching a rosary,” Rimbaud wrote to a friend. “Three hours later he had renounced his god and reopened the 98 wounds of Our Savior.”

The next six years of Rimbaud’s life are only sketchily documented. He was back in London in 1874, and spent part of the year working as a tutor elsewhere in England. In Stuttgart, the following February, he gave Verlaine a copy of the Illuminations, intending him to pass them on to a mutual friend to have them printed. His peregrinations took him as far as Indonesia, in 1876, as a recruit in the Dutch Colonial Army, which he deserted two weeks after his arrival. Robb tentatively dates one of the Illuminations to this period, but perhaps only because it sounds so like a farewell to poetry:


the noise, movement, and hope they foment!

For sale: mathematical certainties and astonishing harmonic leaps. Unimaginable discoveries and terminologies—available now.


He circled around Europe several more times, picking up languages (at one point he was teaching himself Russian from a Greek-Russian dictionary). An extraordinary letter describes his ascent of the Alps in a straight narrative of a kind not seen either during his poetic period or during the time he spent in Africa:


The road, which is never wider than six meters, is filled the whole way with nearly two meters of fallen snow, which, at any moment, might collapse, covering you with a meter-thick blanket you have to hack through during a hailstorm. And then: no more shadows above, below, or beside, despite being surrounded by these massive things; no more road, or precipices, or gorges or sky: just whiteness out of a dream, to touch, to see or not to see.


In December, 1878, Rimbaud found work in Cyprus as a quarry supervisor. His first letter from Cyprus, in February, gives evidence of the isolation that would mark the rest of his life: “The nearest village is one hour away on foot. There is nothing here but a jumble of rocks, a river, and the sea. There are no houses. No soil, no gardens, no trees.” One could add: no poetry. This is as literary as Rimbaud will ever allow himself to be from now on. By May of 1880, he had a new job supervising the construction of a palace for the governor-general, but a few months later he reported to his family that he had left Cyprus “after disagreements with the paymaster and my engineer.” At best, this was a half-truth. Ottorino Rosa, who became friendly with Rimbaud in Africa, reported that he “had the misfortune, when throwing a stone, to strike a native worker on the temple, killing him instantly.” Rosa implies that it was an accident, but, if so, why did Rimbaud flee so quickly and so furtively?

"Shall I offer you African chants? Houri dances? Shall I disappear?” the narrator of “Une Saison en Enfer” asks. The accomplished Arabist that Rimbaud would become might have been amused by his teen-age dreams of the exotic, but the last part, at least, was right. When his poetry began to resurface in France in the eighteen-eighties (thanks to Verlaine, who made renewed efforts to publish it), he had vanished so completely that he was often referred to as “the late Arthur Rimbaud.”

Rimbaud arrived in Aden in August, 1880, and almost immediately found work in the office of Alfred Bardey, a coffee trader. He seems to have had a talent for business. “I have the complete confidence of my employer,” he wrote to his family. During the next eleven years, he travelled back and forth between Aden and East Africa, establishing a base for the company at Harar, in Abyssinia, and from there leading treks farther into the interior. The majority of his letters from these years—there are more than a hundred and fifty in all—were sent to his mother and sister, Isabelle, whom he addressed formally as “Dear Friends.” Requests for books, scientific instruments, or other favors are the common theme. His demands were endless: at one point he wanted a special gun for elephant hunting; later his mother spent a small fortune on photographic equipment. The sheer volume of this correspondence, which often included specific instructions on how the materials were to be sent, gives some sense of how maddeningly difficult his often contradictory orders must have been to accommodate. At one point, his mother apparently refused to continue supplying him. “This is not the way to help a man who is thousands of leagues away from home, traveling among savage peoples and without a single correspondent where he resides,” Rimbaud responded angrily. “If I can’t even ask my family for favors, who the hell am I supposed to go to?” He then requested a few more books.

Rimbaud’s life in Africa was not as bleak as this rather self-pitying tone suggests. Charles Nicholl’s engaging account of those years, “Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa, 1880-1891,” reveals that he was remembered vividly by a number of friends as a charming conversationalist and a scrupulously honest businessman who immersed himself in the culture of the region. During his time in Harar, he lived with a local woman for a year and a half, and he also had a servant of whom he was sufficiently fond to make the only beneficiary of his will. There are numerous testimonials to his learned discussions of the Koran and to his deep interest in Muslim cultures. (Rimbaud used a seal stamped “Abdoh Rinbo,” which, as Abdoh is an abbreviation of Abdullah, means that Rimbaud was calling himself “Rimbaud the servant of Allah.”) Nor was he “without a single correspondent.” Mason has chosen to exclude from his edition more than thirty letters that Rimbaud sent to Alfred Ilg, a Swiss trader, arguing that these letters are of interest mainly for the information they contain about Rimbaud’s business dealings. But the excerpts that others have published show that the frequent contact—thirty-three letters in a few years is a lot, considering the circumstances—led to a warm relationship between the two men, and that even these business letters were marked by Rimbaud’s humor and keen descriptive powers.

The central professional event of Rimbaud’s African career was an expedition that he led to bring arms to King Menelik of Choa, in the heart of Abyssinia. Stymied by various obstacles, including the death of two men whom he had lined up as his partners, Rimbaud spent a year organizing the caravan, which finally departed in the fall of 1886. It was a disaster. Throughout the four-month journey, Rimbaud was beset by men who claimed that Pierre Labatut, one of Rimbaud’s would-be partners, had died owing them money. When he finally reached Menelik, the King seized the merchandise and forced him to liquidate the caravan at a ruinously low price. This setback seems to have thoroughly disillusioned Rimbaud. “I am bored all the time,” he wrote to his family in 1888. “And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the matter of living without one’s family, without intellectual pursuits, lost in the midst of all these Negroes whose lives one is trying to improve and who, themselves, are trying to take advantage of you and make it impossible for you to sell your wares without delays.” His mother had continually pressured him to get married, to which he normally replied that he didn’t have time to look for a wife. But in August, 1890, his tone changed abruptly. “Could I get married at your house next spring?” he asked her. “But I wouldn’t be able to stay there, nor abandon my work here. Do you think I could find someone who would be willing to follow me in my travels?”

He may already have sensed that his travels were nearing an end. In February, 1891, back in Harar, he was troubled by a pain in his right knee that rapidly worsened; he asked his mother to send stockings to treat varicose veins, but when they arrived his leg was too swollen for him to put them on. By the time he realized that it would be necessary to return to Aden for treatment, he could no longer walk. A crew of sixteen servants carried him on a litter for the nightmarish eleven-day journey to the coast, which he documented in a tersely written diary. (A sample entry: “Porters proceed badly. At 9:30 stop in Arrouina. Throw me to the ground on arrival. I impose a 4 thaler fine.”) From Aden, he sailed to Marseille, where he learned that he had cancer. On May 22, 1891, he telegrammed his mother, “Today, you or Isabelle, come to Marseille by express train. Monday morning they amputate my leg. Risk of death. Serious matters to settle.” The surgery seems only to have increased his suffering. He died in Marseille six months later.

Are the Africa letters actually “sacrilege,” as Camus believed? Certainly, they do not paint a complimentary portrait of Rimbaud, revealing an almost completely unreflective and mercantile—in a word, prosaic—man. Critics have tended to dismiss the second phase of his life, to pretend that Rimbaud in Africa was literally “someone else.” No real poet, they worry, could have abandoned his art without so much as a glance back.

But the more difficult question that Rimbaud’s life raises is what to make of an artist whose career ends before he reaches maturity. It is disconcerting that a teen-ager should have created the fantastic visions of “Le Bateau Ivre,” the surrealism of “Voyelles,” the imagery of the Illuminations—and then dispensed with poetry altogether. The life of the artist should be the most compelling bildungsroman of all; the portrait of an artist as a young man implies that he has already grown older. The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of one.


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Photocomposition of Rimbaud by Wojnarowicz
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POESIE
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OPERE VARIE incl. ALBUM ZUTIQUE
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ILLUMINATIONS
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ILLUMINATIONS
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UNE SAISON EN ENFER
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A SEASON IN HELL
English
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~ Saggio di Verlaine 1
~ Saggio di Verlaine 2 + poesie
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