by Jeremy Reed
Rimbaud’s impatience with insipid poetry, his attack on the self-indulgent sentimentality or subjectivity of Izambard’s verse, becomes in the second letter a fulmination against ‘countless idiotic generations’. The ‘mad rage’ that Rimbaud describes as subverting his passion to become involved in the battle of Paris, was the furnacing chaos within him cooling to visionary lucidity. He is a ‘worker’ in the name of poetic vision. To have arrived at where one is in poetry entails mental aeons of unconscious activity. The atemporal functionings of the imagination, inheriting as it does archetypes, myth, reincarnational experience, and delivered in intermittent and blinding flashes, injected into Rimbaud at this time a visionary cosmogony quite disproportionate to his age and worldly knowledge. Poets who rely wholly on the acquisition of empirical data are those whose impetus dries up in a middle-age drought. Visionary poetry is inexhaustible, for it picks up on the rhythm of the cosmos. Meteors chase through the poet’s head.
It is in the second of the Lettres du voyant that Rimbaud offers his fullest and most impassioned commitment to an uncompromising poetic delirium. Written two days after the first letter, the beliefs he expresses have ignited in his nerves.
Rimbaud begins his letter — dated 15 May 1871 and addressed to Paul Demeny — by cutting history down to size, reducing the redoubtable forest to firewood. With a smack of justifiably imperious condescension he announces:
... All ancient poetry culminated in the Greek, harmonious Life. — From Greece to the romantic movement — in the Middle Ages — there are writers, and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations. Racine alone is pure, strong, great. — If his rhymes had been liquidated, and his hemistiches mixed up, today the Divine Fool would be as little known as any old author of Origins. — After Racine, the game gets rusty. It has been going on for two thousand years!
Whether or not Rimbaud had read the authors he quotes, his assumptions ring vitally true. Dead poetry, fossil poetry, Racine’ s mechanical couplets, Rimbaud saw that all these things remained an impediment to poetic progress. Lacking inner dynamism and a conflict worked out through the opposition of irreconcilables, most poetry by the mid-nineteenth century had devolved into ‘rhymed prose’, in the manner that most of the bad poetry written today goes under the banner of free verse, while it is in fact prose arbitrarily truncated to make the line lengths appear to conform to poetic structure. Rimbaud is not only intent on shocking, but he is deadly serious in his aim to invent a new poetics, something he was to achieve in the prose poems of Les Illuminations, and in much of the writing that makes up Une saison en enfer.
One can imagine Rimbaud spitting in the process of writing this last letter. His thoughts raced too fast. It was hot, and he was probably uncomfortable in his dirty clothes. What could his mother have to do with this? She wouldn’t have understood a line. His potential was suddenly before him; it moved jerkily like a series of film stills not yet edited into a sequence. The part of his mind not concentrating on the page was probably devising ways of getting drinks in the local Cafés. His friend Bretagne would see to that later. When he takes the letter up again it is to attack those for whom writing is an ego-dominated experience:
‘If those old idiots had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we shouldn’t have to sweep away the millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intelligence, by claiming to be the authors!’
Before arriving at the inspired prescriptions necessary for the poet to become a visionary, an inhabitant of the great dream, Rimbaud cleans the past like a fish. Men are still awaiting the arrival of a poet. ‘Pen-pushers, civil servants: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!’ Even Baudelaire, whom Rimbaud called ‘king of poets’, had advanced and withdrawn from the edge. Rimbaud, like an astrophysicist in the twentieth century, was about to release the blueprints for ecstatic mental flight. The dervish, the shaman, the assassin intoxicated by hashish, would have understood his demands. It is right to be ‘monstrous’ he asserts: ‘Think of a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.’ His assertions are unequivocal.
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and systematized derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness; he searches himself, he consumes all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. Unspeakable torture in which he needs self-conviction and super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great outlaw — and the Wise Man! — Because he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He reaches the unknown, and even if, demented, he ends up losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die as he forces through unheard of, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one collapsed!
Rimbaud’s imperatives are unprecedentedly revolutionary. They demand a commitment to the work and a willingness to explore all facets of human experience, such as few poets have ever dared contemplate. If you need a fix of heroin, and Rimbaud’s demands are no less extreme, you may have to sell your body to pay for your habit. If you are a poet, you may have to steal to live. You become ‘the great criminal’, not only in the sense of aspiring to occult knowledge but in the context of living outside society. At the time that Rimbaud was formulating his belief in poetic dementia, and the fearless journeying to the interior where man must alchemically distil his emotions, extracting only what is of use to the experiment, poetry was comfortably in the hands of the safe. Banville, Hugo, Tennyson and Arnold, not to mention Longfellow, were all busy writing poetry that conformed to public sentiment. Rimbaud’s discoveries would have appeared an act of madness to their retrograde conformism.
Rimbaud strikes like a wolf aiming for the throat. Only Nietzsche would have understood his ecstatic celebration of evil as an objective contributory to creative vision. And the poet must be willing to accept death as the outcome of his Promethean raid on the inarticulate. The latter is a small price to pay for the incandescent immediacy of having seen and known the high points of visionary crystallization.
Rimbaud swallowed fire. He was a magician who used his psychophysical responses as a bridge across the universe. He was at this time an ecstatic savant. He was Prometheus inciting the retribution that comes from stealing fire.
At the time of writing this second May letter, ‘we found him too gloomy, too irascible; his movements were jerky, his manners crude. His mother was desperate about him: at one point, he seemed so strange that she thought he was mad’, writes Paterne Berrichon.
Rimbaud continues the letter to Demeny with growing excitement and a sense of corresponding intolerance.
Therefore the poet is really the thief of fire.
He is responsible for humanity, even for the animals; he will have to have his visions smelt, felt and heard; if what he brings back from down there has form, he gives it form; if it is formless, he leaves it like that. A language must be found; — Besides, all speech is idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academic — more dead than a fossil — to compile a dictionary, no matter the language. Weak-minded people, beginning by thinking about the first letter of the alphabet, would quickly go mad! This language will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colours, thought contesting thought. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in his time in the universal soul: he would provide more — than the formulation of his thought, than the record of his march towards Progress! Enormity becoming normal, absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplier of progress!
Rimbaud’s Promethean assertions which adhere to the romantic credo that creation is synonymous with death, and that one involves the other, are here translated into a context of total artistic revolution. Vision demands new sensory responses; its exi
stence in poetry asks that it appeals to all the senses: smell, touch, hearing and so forth. These synaesthetic qualities, which will afford poetry a universal language, are achieved by a journey undertaken là-bas — down there. And Rimbaud had already spent a lot of time staring into the void. The poet carries the pit inside him; all manner of violent disturbance has to be encountered in the exploration of the shadow, and what is retrieved may have form or not. What is important is that it is not discounted from poetry on any moral pretext. And the poet’s discoveries will require the new language, of which Rimbaud warns that madness will ensue should it be encountered by the unprepared. Rimbaud’s notion of language is cabalistic, orphic, alchemical; it pivots on the individual symbolism contained by words through their component letter and number valencies. Language is breath: and poetry is the occult manifestation of that rhythm. The poet, says Rimbaud, is ‘responsible for humanity, even for the animals’. His words should animate the universe. He should be able to interpret the communication of all creatures. The poet is the one through whom the universe vibrates. In Rimbaud, the distinction between self and world, individual and differentiated objects is broken down. Most poetry is written with the notion that the subjective responds to objective phenomena. Rimbaud hastens to rectify this misconception.
Why was his mother desperate about him at this time? It is unlikely that he had access to drugs in Charleville — this was to come later in Paris — but clearly his aberrations had become ungovernable. Did he interfere with his sisters? Did his mother catch him masturbating? As a behaviour trait in Paris, he excreted into his host’s milk bottle. It is possible he did the same at home. But there had also been trouble with his former teacher Georges Izambard. Ever since Rimbaud had sent Izambard ‘Le Cœur volé’, with its undisguised admission of homosexuality, a wedge had come between the two; a division which was to prove final. Izambard had written in response to Rimbaud’s poem and poetic theory: ‘You devised some incoherent and heteroclite thoughts, from which a small, monstrous foetus is born, which you then put in a glass jar... And be careful, with your theory of the seer, that you don’t end up in the jar yourself, a monster in the museum.’ Rimbaud’s reply to his teacher’s inevitable caution must have been violent and obscene, for Izambard was sufficiently miffed as to send it to Madame Rimbaud. Izambard may have been intending to clear himself of any possible intimations of homosexual conduct with Rimbaud, who may himself have set a rumour abroad, and thus wanted to come clean before the latter’s mother. How better to vindicate himself than to point to Arthur’s homo-erotic poetry and to the psychotic notions inherent in his poetic theory? One can imagine the storm at home; Rimbaud’s hysteria, his nervous frustration, must have had him spring at his mother like a cornered rat. They were all trying to interfere with his mind. Those whose limitations extended to monotheism, provincialism, inveterately inherited moral values. What could Rimbaud with his Messianic quest have to do with this?
He continues:
This future will be materialistic, as you see. — Always full of Number and Harmony, these poems will be made to endure. — Essentially, it will be Greek Poetry again, in a way.
Eternal art will have its functions, since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer lend rhythm to action; it will be in advance.
There will be poets like this! When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man — up till now abominable — having given her her freedom, she to will be a poet! Woman will discover the unknown! Will her world of ideas differ from ours? — She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive and delicious; we shall accept them, we shall understand them.
Meanwhile, let us ask the poet for something new — ideas and forms. All the smart alecks will soon think they have satisfied this demand: — but it is not so.
The prophetic note inherent in Rimbaud’s visionary prescriptions, which demand both a return to the intuitive response of primitive poetry and a means of projecting into the future — ‘let us ask the poet for something new’ — is a dramatic anticipation of certain modes of thought which have become a pattern in the twentieth century. Rimbaud had already dismissed his century as inert, immobile and little likely to improve. By mid-century poetry is usually stuck in a rut, and a plethora of derivative poets continue to live off the major voice from an earlier time. Like Lautréamont, Rimbaud was already living in the century he was never to reach. He would have poetry live in advance of action, rather than be the reflective principle commenting on the age’s discoveries. It is up to the poet to get there first. ‘And there will be poets like this!’ he assures us. They were to come in number in another time, another place. Rilke, Trakl, Apollinaire, Breton, St-John Perse, Eliot, Neruda, Montale — these are a few who have brought a new poetics to bear on the twentieth century. And Rimbaud envisages the psychosexual emancipation of women. She too has a vital part to play in the discovery of the unknown. Once she has freed herself from man’s ‘abominable’ denial and repression of her inner motives, she will more closely respond to the poetic summons than man, with his overriding impulse towards warfare and territorial imperatives.
Rimbaud was looking for a new race, a people who would invent the future according to the instruction of vision. The world could be imagined into existence. The atman, the supra-human, was he who cultivated his visionary faculties for the arrival of a new dawn.
Rimbaud knew himself capable of undertaking the heroic task set the poet, one even more daring in its social implications than Shelley’s animated conviction that the imagination represents creative fire. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry comes close to Rimbaud’s Lettres du voyant in its declared Promethean beliefs that the inspired poet re-creates the world. Poets are in Shelley’s words, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. But Shelley’s upbringing, his classical education, his mythomania, would never have allowed him to go as far as Rimbaud. To conceive of the poet as ‘the great criminal’, and to suggest that women have as important a part to play in imaginative discovery as men, are ideas that link Rimbaud not only with the succeeding century but with ongoing continuity. There will never be a poetry in which Rimbaud does not play a part.
In reality he was too poor even to stamp his letters. His mother believed that if she deprived him of money he would either return to his studies or be forced to find a job. He consented to neither. If he was questioned, he replied: ‘Shit’. He threw lice from his hair at Charleville antagonists, and gave readings of poems such as `Accroupissements’, ‘Les Premières Communions’ and ‘Le Cœur volé’ at Charles Bretagne’s house. Someone had to be shot down. Banville was a good target; the florist poet whom Rimbaud had begun by tolerating was ripe to receive a satellite message of Rimbaudian insolence. Having satirized Banville in his poem `Ce qu’on dit au poëte à propos de fleurs’, he thought it necessary to remind the eminent poet of his existence.
Sir and dear Master
Do you remember receiving from the provinces, in June 1870, a hundred or a hundred and fifty mythological hexameters entitled Credo in unam? You were kind enough to answer!
The same imbecile is sending you the above verses, signed Alcide Bava. — I beg your pardon.
I am eighteen. — I shall always love Banville’s verses.
Last year I was only seventeen!
Have I made any progress?
ALCIDE BAVA.
A.R.
Had Banville made any progress? By writing ‘Le Bateau ivre’, Rimbaud had not only given support to his poetic theory but at a stroke had liquidated his contemporaries. As if in preparation for another autumnal departure, he had written ‘Le Bateau ivre’ in August 1871. No matter the case put forward for the poem being influenced by Rimbaud’s reading of such books as Michelet’s La Mer, Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), Poe’s sea stories like The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and A Descent into the Maelstrom, Baudelaire’s Le Voyage, and whatever other fabulous accounts of the oce
an he may have derived from literary sources, ‘Le Bateau ivre’ is more than all of these the undertaking of a great inner journey. Everything that had happened to this boy who was still not seventeen is compounded into the poem’s violent and multi-coloured mosaic. It is the culmination of Rimbaud’s childhood obsessions, and provides the metaphorical vessel for his flight not only from Charleville but from the visible world. We know biographically that as a child Rimbaud used to push a boat out into the green river Meuse, as far as its mooring-chain would permit, and that at home he would stretch out on a piece of canvas In his room, imagining sails, sea-roads, tropical islands, the spiritual freedom that comes with leaving the earth behind. And this poem, so fiercely innovative, so charged with visionary colour, was to be the credential with which he would face the Parnassians in Paris. Moreover, it was the poem he was to send to Paul Verlaine by way of an introduction to his inflammatory genius.
What was it like for Rimbaud in that intolerable August of 1871? He had written a poem so powerful, so far in advance of anything he had known or seen, a poem which remains one of the great works of imaginative lyricism; but he was no one outside his own estimate. The lapidary fire that blazes in the aqueous quatrains that make up ‘Le Bateau ivre’ had been living in his head for how long? He had no idea. It was enough that he could do it without inquiring into the poem’s source. He ate little, he was growing physically, his clothes resembled a tramp’s, there was no one with whom he could discuss the trauma attendant on being raped, and his obscenity was viciously scatological.
