The marvellous visionary French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud known for being the ‘enfant terrible’ of French literature and for .his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism, an individual whose work and life I've long been interested in, Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville in the Ardennes region of northern France near the Belgium border on October 20, 1854. His father was an infantry officer frequently away from home, and Arthur’s parents separated when he was six, leaving him to be raised by his rigid, narrow-minded, humorless, miserly mother, whom he called the “mouth of darkness.”
A priest at the Pension Rossat, where Arthur was enrolled, inspired him to love Greek, Latin, and French literature, and encouraged him to write poetry. and he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student.
He surprised from an early age with his intellectual precocity and a special talent for communicating images and feelings through words. At the age of ten, he began to make known his first verses, with great imagination and sense of rhythm, to such an extent that the writer Victor Hugo called him the “child Shakespeare” and many consider him the “father of modern poetry”.
At the age of 17 he wrote- The Drunken Boat , one of his most celebrated poems: “I know of the skies that burst into lightning, and of the waterspouts and the undertows and the currents. I know of the afternoon, of the Dawn exalted like a village of doves. And I have seen sometimes, that which man has believed to see! (…) I would have liked to show the children those golds. Of the blue wave, the gold fish, the singing fish. The foam of the flowers has blessed my wanderings and ineffable winds gave me their wings for a moment”.
As in these verses, he never forgot his passionate childhood. What better than to let him speak, through his own definition in the famous work entitled We Must Be Absolutely Modern :
“I am an inventor whose merits differ greatly from those who have preceded me; I am even a musician who has found something like the key to love. Now, a gentleman of a bitter field under a sober sky, I try to be moved by the memory of my beggarly childhood (3), of the time of apprenticeship and of arriving in wooden shoes of the disputes, of the five or six widowhoods and of some parties in which my stubbornness prevented me from being in tune with my friends."
By the time he was seventeen, Rimbaud had become a dyed-in-the-wood rebel and libertine he consumed alcohol, wrote obscene poems, stole books, and allowed his appearance to grow unkempt and disheveled.What makes Rimbaud’s poetry so important, is part of what makes his life so compelling, his sheerrebellion, audacity, creativity and exploration.
Almost all of Rimbaud’s poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Against the backdrop of the crumbling Second Empire and the tumultuous Paris Commune, the poet took centuries-old traditions of French versification and picked them apart with an unmatched knowledge of how they fitted together.
Combining sensuality with pastoral, parody, political satire, fable, eroticism and mystery, Rimbaud’s works range from traditional verse forms to prose-poetry and the two first free-verse poems written in French. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to Symbolism and for A Season in Hell, a precursor to modernist literature. Within it Rimbaud fully tested the boundaries of traditional forms of verse. In an approach to writing verse he famously described as a "rational derangement of all the senses",
When Rimbaud's mother asked of A Season in Hell, "What does it mean?" - perhaps voicing a universe inquiry, Rimbaud answered, "It means what it says, literally and in every sense."
Rimbaud allowed his own observations to dictate his experiments with language and the rhythmic flow of his poems. It did not matter to him if his visions lacked coherence or shape, and it was images, and the ideas he associated with those images, that determined the arrangement of his poetry.
Thematically, Rimbaud's poetry also challenged conservative norms. His complex relationship with his domineering mother saw him rebel against her strict Catholic standards. He would reject all forms of scholarly rationalism, and all concessions to traditional family and civic values. His writing, which sometimes ventured into mysticism and spiritualism, also dared to celebrate the "virtues" of apathy, laziness, and vice.
Critics have called Rimbaud one of the creators of free verse for such poems as Marine and Mouvement in Les Illuminations. Rimbaud had written in Une Saison en Enfer:
"I believed I could acquire supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories!"
Rimbaud wrote to several poets in order to promote his work,but received no replies, so his friend, Charles Auguste Bretagne, advised him to write to Paul Verlaine, an eminent Symbolist poet. who as it happens Rimbad greatly admired.
Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters with several of his poems, including the hypnotic, finally shocking "Le Dormeur du Val" (The Sleeper in the Valley), in which Nature is called upon to comfort an apparently sleeping soldier.
Verlaine was intrigued by Rimbaud, and replied, "Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you," sending him a one-way ticket to Paris.Rimbaud arrived in late September 1871 and resided briefly in Verlaine's home. Verlaine's wife, Mathilde Mauté, was seventeen years old and pregnant, and Verlaine had recently left his job and started drinking.
In later published recollections of his first sight of Rimbaud at the age of seventeen, Verlaine described him as having "the real head of a child, chubby and fresh, on a big, bony, rather clumsy body of a still-growing adolescent", with a "very strong Ardennes accent that was almost a dialect". His voice had "highs and lows as if it were breaking."
Desire him, Verlaine certainly did. Rimbaud and Verlaine began a short and torrid affair. The Parisian literary coterie was scandalized by Rimbaud, whose behaviour was that of the archetypal enfant terrible, yet throughout this period he continued to write poems.
He moved in with Verlaine and his wife and was a houseguest from hell: his room was a squalid sty, he indulged heavily in absinthe and hashish, he sunbathed stark naked in the front garden, he picked lice from his overgrown hair and flicked them onto visitors, he smashed china, he desecrated an heirloom crucifix, he sold some of his hosts’ furniture, and he used a magazine containing poems by a friend of Verlaine’s for toilet paper.
Verlaine, enamored of the boy, was delighted with his antics. Throughout these rambunctious teen years.They indulged in absinthe ,opium and hashish together, and reveled in their sexual excesses, even collaborating on a “Sonnet du trou du cul”—which can most politely be translated as “Sonnet in Praise of the Butthole,” and whose contents are decidedly pornographic which includes the lines “Dark and puckered like a violet carnation/It breathes, humbly lurking amidst the moss,” and “It’s the shrivelled olive and the flute-hugger.”.
Rimbaud entered into a prolific period of creativity during the next three years, turning out virtually his entire body of work in that time. In 1872 Verlaine abandoned his wife and child and took Rimbaud with him to England, where they lived in Bloomsbury and Camden Town, and scraped a living by teaching and an allowance from Verlaine’s mother. Rimbaud stuck to his writing in the Reading Room of the British Museum to take advantage of the free heating, lighting, pens, and ink. After several months in London, Verlaine went to Brussels, where he asked his mother and Rimbaud to join him at the Hotel Liège.
Now drinking even more heavily, Verlaine bought a pistol, with which he intended to commit suicide, but instead he used it to shoot Rimbaud in the wrist during a violent lovers’ quarrel. Rimbaud declined to press charges but wisely decided to hightail it out of Brussels. On the way to the train station, Verlaine threatened him again, and Rimbaud summoned a police officer and had him arrested. Verlaine served two years in prison for the assault.
Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and wrote his last verses, after which he abandoned poetry forever. In his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary outputi ncluding Le Bateau ivre, Une Saison en Enfer, and Illuminations, that became hallmarks of French surrealism.
In 1875 he and Verlaine met for the last time. Verlaine had become an exceedingly pious Catholic, and Rimbaud described him as “clutching a rosary in his claws.” They parted on chilly terms. However despite this Verlaine was nevertheless essentially faithful to Rimbaud even after their friendship collapsed, and arranged publication of his Complete Poems in 1895.
By the age of 21, he had ceased writing poetry altogether, turning his back on the literary world to seek a different path. After quitting poetry, Rimbaud studied Italian, Spanish, and German, and committed to touring Europe, often on foot, seeking adventure and opportunities to make money.
In 1876 Rimbaud went to Vienna, where he was robbed of all his money and stripped of his clothes by a cab driver. The French consul general arranged for his passage back to France. Then he joined the Dutch Colonial Army and served in the East Indies, but deserted into the Indonesian jungle and eventually found his way back to France once more.
In 1877, Rimbaud spent some time working in a traveling circus in Sweden and Denmark before, in December 1878, arriving in Cyprus where he took a job as a stone quarry foreman. After five months in Cyprus, he contracted typhoid and returned to France. Critic John Tranter writes that, in March 1880, Rimbaud "found work in Cyprus again, as a foreman of a construction gang in the mountains. He got involved in a quarrel and, it seems, threw a stone which hit a local worker on the temple and killed him.!
Rimbaud fled, travelling through the Red Sea - further and further from Europe - and ending up in the British port of Aden, a sun-baked volcanic crater perched at the gateway to the Indian Ocean and the coast of Yemen".
Once in Aden, Rimbaud worked for Alfred Bardey, a coffee trader. Already fluent in English and German (and with a working knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian) he quickly took to native languages and dialects. Tranter writes that "once he'd learned the ropes and proved himself useful and trustworthy, Bardey asked him to set up a branch of the business in Harar, five hundred kilometres from Aden [...] in the highlands of Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then".
The route to Harar was perilous as it was policed by the notorious Danakil tribesmen (they had recently attacked a French trader and his wife, killing them and their twenty Abyssinian guards, taking their testicles as battle trophies). Rimbaud risked the journey and once in Harar, befriended the Governor, Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael Wolde Melekot, father of future emperor Haile Selassie.
In Harar, Rimbaud was soon trading on his own behalf. As Tranter explains, "he had developed a circle of friends among the Africans as well as the Europeans. He had a devoted servant, a beautiful Abyssinian mistress, and a busy schedule. He'd earned the esteem of the society he'd chosen to join". However, Rimbaud was not happy with his new life (which, Tranter suggests, had been rather forced on him following the killing of his fellow workman in Cyprus). Tranter makes his point by citing Rimbaud's letters home (mostly to his mother).
It was a life from which literature was completely absent. As far as I can determine, in all the letters he wrote to his family during these last years, he never once mentions literature. (He does mention books, but they are invariably technical or instructional ones.) He certainly never wrote poetry again. He did write, though: He published several pieces on East Africa, including a treatise on Ogaden that appeared in the bulletin of the French Geographical Society. It was decently, though not memorably, written, but its author hardly seemed the same Arthur Rimbaud who had upset and forever altered the French literary world.
In fact, like many before him and after, Rimbaud reinvented himself. The problem for posterity has been that with this reinvention, Rimbaud discarded his marvelous ability to spin words in the stars. When, some years later, Pierre Bardey's brother Alfred happened to learn that Rimbaud had written poetry and was revered in certain small circles in Paris, he confronted Rimbaud with this. Rimbaud seemed aghast: "Absurd! Ridiculous! Disgusting!" he said to Bardey. The Rimbaud who had written "The Drunken Boat" and A Season in Hell was dead and buried. The new Rimbaud wanted to make money. And, perhaps, to do some exploring and a bit of photography. This was the Arthur Rimbaud who arrived in Aden, Yemen in August of 1880 whose personality could hardly have been more different from the wild days of his youth. People who knew him said he was taciturn, withdrawn, gruff, and unsociable, but honest and methodical as a trader, with a dry sense of humor. He led a simple, almost ascetic, life, and he delighted in helping the poor.
In 1884 he left his job at Bardey's to become a merchant on his own account in Harar, where his commercial dealings included coffee and (generally outdated) firearms.
He was, in fact, a pioneer in the business, the first European to oversee the export of the celebrated coffee of Harar from the country where coffee was born. He was only the third European ever to set foot in the city, and the first to do business there.
In 1885 Rimbaud became involved in a major deal to sell old rifles to the king of Shewa.The explorer Paul Soleillet became involved early in 1886. The arms were landed at Tadjoura in February, but could not be moved inland because Léonce Lagarde, governor of the new French administration of Obock and its dependencies, issued an order on 12 April 1886 prohibiting the sale of weapons.
In February of 1891, when he was thirty-six, he noticed a pain in his right knee, which made it difficult to walk, and he assumed it was arthritis. When it became more troublesome, he had a canvas stretcher made and was carried on it more than 150 miles across the desert to the port of Zeila in Somaliland. From there, he sailed to Aden, Yemen, where he saw a European doctor, who misdiagnosed his ailment as tubercular synovitis, an inflammation of the membrane around the kneejoints, frequently seen in rheumatoid arthritis.
He recommended immediate amputation of the leg. Rimbaud remained in Aden until May 7, when he took the steamer L’Amazone on a thirteen-day voyage to Marseille, where he was admitted to Conception Hospital, and on May 27 underwent amputation of his leg. It was discovered that he was actually suffering from osteosarcoma, advanced bone cancer, and had only a few months to live.
He wrote to his sister Isabelle: “What a nuisance, what a bore, what misery when I think of my former travels, and how active I was just 5 months ago! Where is my skipping across mountains, the walks, the treks through deserts, across rivers, and over seas? And now, the life of a one-legged cripple…. And to think I had decided to come back to France this summer to get married! Goodbye to wedding, goodbye to family, goodbye to future! My life is gone, I'm no more than an immobile trunk.”
Isabelle joined him in Marseille and remained with him during his last days, engineering his deathbed conversion to the Catholic Church. She wrote to their mother in Charleville on October 28: “He is no longer a poor, unrepentant sinner. He is now a saint, a martyr, one of the just, one of the chosen! Sunday morning, after mass, one of the priests came to see him and offered to hear his confession—and he accepted! As he left, the priest told me, ‘Your brother has the true faith. I have never seen faith of this quality.’ I kissed the ground with joy. There is joy, even in his death, now that his soul is saved!” Despite his repentance, the priest did not offer Rimbaud communion since he felt he was too weak to receive it and might vomit on the host. Isabelle described her brother’s condition: “His stump is extremely swollen. There is an enormous cancerous growth between his hip and his belly, just on top of the bone. All the doctors—ten of them have visited him—seem terrified by this strange cancer. They say his case is unique, and there is something about it they don’t understand. Arthur’s head and left arm are in great pain, but he usually remains in a a deep lethargy, apparently sleeping. At night he has a morphine injection. When he wakes, he says odd things, thinking we are in Ethiopia or Yemen and must find camels and organize a caravan…He has the thinness of a skeleton and the color of a corpse. And his poor limbs are all paralyzed, mutilated, and dead around him. O God, how pitiful!”
His cancer widespread, Rimbaud died on November 10, 1891, alone and miserable. Though he was by then aware that some of his poetry had been published and had attracted attention, he had not a clue of the magnitude of his eventual, posthumous fame. Would he have cared? In one of his last letters, also written to his sister, he wrote, "Our life is a misery, an endless misery! Why do we exist?" He was 37. He was buried at his place of birth in Charleville.
Arthur Rimbaud led a truly remarkable life. When he wasn’t running away from home, denouncing God, or having an illicit love affair with Paul Verlaine, he wrote some truly remarkable poetry and was obviously an incredible genius whose influence has extended long after his death, with his life and poetry analyzed and celebrated a myriad times.
Following Rimbaud's example, many Dadaists and Surrealists engaged in spontaneous wordplay and other games and activities associated with free association and collage. Rimbaud had led the way in showing how one could visualize the workings of the subconscious.
His influence has passed down through the generations, too, with figures as wide-ranging as Marcel Proust, André Freynaud, David Wojnarowicz, Samuel Beckett, John Ashbery, Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Regina Hansen all acknowledging a degree of debt to Rimbaud's way of working.
In “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” Bob Dylan includes the line “Relationships have all been bad/Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud.”
Sixteen-year-old Patti Smith, enduring the drudgery of working in a New Jersey factory, stated that her "salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket ] became the bible of my life" Her song “Easter” is about Rimbaud’s first communion. and she considers him "the first child of punk-rock", for inspiring talented lyricists of this genre.
Jim Morrison, of The Doors, wrote to Wallace Fowlie in 1968 to thank him for his English translation of Rimbaud’s poems; Fowlie subsequently wrote the book Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel as Poet.
What began with Rimbaud continued with the Beat Generation poets who honoured Rimbaud for his systematic disordering of the senses. Proust said that Rimbaud was “almost superhuman.” Edmund White ends his biography, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, with the line “Every important thinker and artist of the last hundred years has had an opinion about Rimbaud, who continues to elude us as he streaks just ahead of our grasp on his ‘soles of wind.’”
The 'enfant terrible'of late 19th century French literature, Rimbaud was a genuine firebrand whose disreputable lifestyle merely reinforced his status as an archetypal rebel. His life was one of scandals, and later, dubious overseas escapades in exotic African countries. The fact that he would come to dismiss his own writing as "absurd, ridiculous [and] disgusting" has merely reinforced his status as a modern literary iconoclast.
Rimbaud's output might have been limited, but it has seen him firmly established as one of the most original and important writers of his generation, and, in his personal life, one of the great anti-authoritarian troublemakers in the mythology of the modernists who continues to captivate readers, artists and writers all over the world.
“Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.” - Arthur Rimbaud
Departure- Arthur Rimbaud
Everything seen...
The vision gleams in every air.
Everything had...
Tthe far sound of cities, in the evening,
In sunlight, and always.
Everything known... O Tumult! O Visions!
These are the stops of life.
Departure in affection, and shining sounds.
Eternity- Arthur Rimbaud
It has been found again.
What ? - Eternity.
It is the sea fled away
With the sun.
Sentinel soul,
Let us whisper the confession
Of the night full of nothingness
And the day on fire.
From human approbation,
From common urges
You diverge here
And fly off as you may.
Since from you alone,
Satiny embers,
Duty breathes Without anyone saying : at last.
Here is no hope, No orietur.
Knowledge and fortitude,
Torture is certain.
It has been found again.
What ? - Eternity.
It is the sea fled away
With the sun.
