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RIMBAUD, ARTHUR.

Life & work of 19th Cent. French Symbolist poet.

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The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud is often explained in terms of his biography. Such an approach is often used for literary figures, though many critics find that it is less important than the form and content of the literary works themselves. In the case of Rimbaud, however, the relationship between his life and his work has become a focus because he seems to have lived in a way that expressed certain poetic and non-conforming attitudes, while it is also possible to find a number of links between Rimbaud's life and certain images that recur in his poetry: "A revolutionary both in his life and in his art, Rimbaud exerted a radical influence on the scope and direction of French poetry." As a poet, Rimbaud is considered innovative, and his accomplishment as a poet is all the more remarkable considering how little he wrote and how young he was when he died. He is

In truth, Verlaine had vacillated all his lifebetween transgressions and repentance, but at the time Rimbaud was seen asthe cause of his undoing, as if Rimbaud had brought transgression into thelife of the other man. [7]Morton Dauwen Zabel, "Rimbaud: Life and Legend," Partisan Review,vol. Such an approach is often used for literary figures, thoughmany critics find that it is less important than the form and content ofthe literary works themselves. He also reacted violently against his upbringingand looked for an opportunity to leave, finally finding one in 187 , at theheight of the Prussian advance, when he ran away to Paris to witness thedownfall of Napoleon III. 4 (July-August 194 ), 269. [2]Roger Clarke, "Rimbaud mentality," Independent (March 31, 1997),14. Cantona puzzled many tabloid hacks at a famous press conference in a now celebrated monologue involving "seagulls" and "trawlers." Little did the sports journalists realize that their idol was giving them a masterclass in Rimbaudian imagery.[4]More recently, the story of Rimbaud and Verlaine has been the subject of afilm that capitalized on the literary interest in Rimbaud and on a certainprurient interest in his homosexual transgressions at the same time: Director Agnieszka Holland has packed it all into Total Eclipse, his harsh presentation of Rimbaud's story. An issue that can be raised with reference to hispoetry is the role of normalcy in his word and the way transgression istreated, transgression from the social norms such as can be seen in hislife and specifically in his homosexual relationship with Verlaine. The poet was sixteen when he wrote it. Here aswell, the poet again links his life with the quest and suggests ways inwhich his own transgressions serve as fodder for the poetic imagination andlinguistic expression: The confession in Une Saison en enfer is an interpretive process in which scrutiny of the poet's past and present, of history, metaphysics, love, writing, and so on, leads inevitably to an examination of the speaking subjects as a configuration in language.[21]The narration begins with certain assumptions about the finally of awritten work and about its capacity to contain its subject, and these ideasare worked out in the course of the narrative. Rimbaud did indeed have enough transgressions ofhis own, and his drug use and unfortunate mode of living tended to alienateeveryone except Verlaine. Dutton, 1919.Wing, Nathaniel. The boat is the narrator, and ittells of how it escaped from its haulers, who in turn are killed byscreaming natives. It can no longer follow in the wake of the merchant ships, nor bear the haughty pride of military gunboats, nor swim beneath the horrible eyes of the prison ships that lie at anchor in the harbor.[18]This poem reflects Rimbaud's view of the poet as seer and also theinfluence of the French symbolists, such as Verlaine and Baudelaire, "whosought to replace the effusive, personalized verse of the Romantics with asymbolic, impersonal mode of expression."[19] One view of the poem is thatthe boat can be seen as a reflection of the poet himself, in which case thepoem can be read as a symbolic account of Rimbaud's efforts to transcendreality by means of language. [5]Ray Mark Rinaldi, "Rimbaud and Verlaine: A Negative View," St. The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud is often explained in terms of hisbiography. In Act III, this sense of nostalgiaturns to despair and anguish: Its quest for the absolute has at length proved futile, and the boat now seeks dissolution in death. New York: E.P. [3]Tony McNeill, "An Introduction to Rimbaud," The Rimbaud Pages(March 14, 1997), www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os tmc/comm.html. [12]Ibid., 1337. "Rimbaud: Life and Legend." Partisan Review, Vol. St. Verlaine left his wife and moved with Rimbaud toLondon. He is indeed known as the poet who stopped writing poetry asa matter of choice. BibliographyClarke, Roger. The great poet merely rasped "poetry is a load of shit" and turned away in Disgust.[2] Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville in a region near the Belgiumborder. [18]Ibid., 1338. He had aprecocious verbal ability as a child, and he produced such accomplishedLatin verses that he often won prizes. LouisPost-Dispatch (November 5, 1995), 8C. Charleville was a small provincial town. It is narrated in the first personand is written as a symbolic drama in three acts. 1 (Fall 1983), 187-211.McNeill, Tony. He fell ill with cancer, returned to France, and died inNovember 1891.[6] Rimbaud's view of the world tended toward mysticism and the other-worldly, as Zabel notes: No poet has invited as many incarnations in the private convenience or beliefs of his students or has become so dramatic an index of the aesthetic divergences of our time. That shift deconstructs the Romantic self, yet is concurrent with a forceful and nostalgic resistance to the process; much of the affective tension of the text is generated by these irreconcilable forces.[22]The act of confession itself is a means of delving into the force oflanguage and the relationship between language and meaning. XII, No. 1 (January 1984), 42- 58.Zabel, Morton Dauwen. At the same time, the boat realizes the impossibility of any turning back to its previous mode of existence. 1 (January1984), 42. [17]Magill, 1337. [22]Ibid., 42-43.----------------------- 13 I have set myself to invent new flowers, a new flesh, a new language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1992.McNeil, Lynda D. Boston: Twayne, 1988.Symons, Arthur. [14]Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1919), 289. [21]Nathaniel Wing, "The Autobiography of Rhetoric: On ReadingRimbaud's 'Une Saison En Enfer,'" French forum, volume 9, No. McNeil, "Rimbaud: The Dialectical Play of Presence andAbsence," boundary 2, vol. Revolution,escape, transgression, and poetry were recurring themes in Rimbaud's workto that time. The world of literature contrastedwith that of Charleville--where Charleville was dull, the world ofliterature was filled with adventure and excitement.[3] The cult of Rimbaud has grown over the years, and he had a majorinfluence on a number of poetic movements and several generations of poets. VII, No. I have fancied that I have attained supernatural power. Arthur Rimbaud. The boat has braveda variety of ills, such as whirlpools, hurricanes, storms at sea, an hugecreatures from the deep. "Rimbaud and Verlaine: A Negative View." St. He detested the place,and when he was older, the people of Charleville detested him. What a fine artist's and story-teller's fame thrown away![14]Rimbaud was not the only writer escaping normalcy for the potentialtransgressions of the mystic and the deviant, and his work in this sensefollows that of Nietzsche, William Blake, Coleridge, and Yeats, thoughRimbaud seeks images of the mystic in symbols and realities of this world: In revolt against the conventional "opaque" vision of things Rimbaud's poetry contains a vast appetite for direct sensation, for an apprehension of the world in all its physicality.[15] Rimbaud was also aware of his own failures, specifically of histendency not to live up to the image he had created of the poet as seer.His most famous work, "The Drunken Boat," has bee seen as evidence of thisfailure: Some critics see it as Rimbaud's first avowal of failure to create poetry according to the concepts of the Seer Letters, an admission he seems to make again in his later works. Aubyn, Arthur Rimbaud (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 42. [19]Ibid., 1338. On his deathbed, nursed by a sister unaware that he had even been a poet, the family doctor at Roche casually asked his bedridden patient about his work written 15 years earlier. For Rimbaud, poetry itself was a form of transgression, taking himaway from what he considered a normal life and putting him through acertain kind of strain and terror. [16]F.C. Rimbaud himself was fascinated by the notion of avatar and mystic possession. From this sense of divine endowment developed his experiments in derangement and hallucination, his wish to create a new order of poetry, his effort to free himself from the confines of his family, his class, his country, from Europe itself.[7]In Rimbaud's works, there is a recurrent fascination with otherness ordeviancy through drugs, mysticism, and sexuality. In hiscollection A Season in Hell, for instance, he continues his search for theelimination of the old and the development of the new in poetry. [8]McNeill, www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os tmc/comm.html. XII, No. The work consists of 25quatrains in classical Alexandrines. VII, No. 1 (Fall 1983), 187. Aubyn, F.C. And had she switched on the TV, she would have seen Eric Cantona finding "room to breathe" on the Eurostar while ostentatiously reading a book of Rimbaud's poems (as does the Terence Stamp character reading on the lawn in Teorema--Pasolini was of course another Rimbaud fan). In this, Rimbaud issimilar to French poets Baudelaire and Lautréamont, holding that "there isa will to knowledge through evil."[8] Rimbaud's poetry is thus marked byan anti-rationalist view of human consciousness, and the world he describesin his works is a fantastic one, "an imaginative transfiguration ordeformation which disturbs any settled idea of reality."[9] Rimbaud's early poetry was more conventional and made use of twogeneral poetic types--satiric verse, and erotic verse: A pastiche of traditional styles and forms, these initial works nevertheless evidence a brilliant gift for verbal expression and announce the theme of revolt which informs all of Rimbaud's writings.[1 ] This constitutes poetic normalcy in one sense, while the poetry thatRimbaud would develop after this would be seen as dedicated totransgression in the form of mysticism, sexuality, and other-worldliness.Rimbaud wrote a letter in 1871 to his friend Paul Demeny, a letter thatbegins with a denunciation of all previous poetry as nothing more thanrhymed prose. Rimbaud's father died young. The poet will thus nurture a genius"unrestrained by societal taboos and the limitations of rationalthought."[12] The Symbolist poets of Rimbaud's time sought to evoke the absent andabstract from nature, but Rimbaud differed in that he engaged in a struggleto regain the absent Totality of Being and so "to make Being present andsensible, to glimpse the infinite in the finite, again and again throughthe magically transforming power of language."[13] Rimbaud's life andpoetry alike can be seen as a process of revolution, of a revolt againstearlier poetry, against Charleville, against civilization itself as hetravels to the deserts of Africa. Still others see it as a poetic prophecy of Rimbaud's own life, with its far-flung travels culminating in the final return to Charleville. Itwas soon after this that Rimbaud renounced poetry and sought escape in adifferent way by traveling to Africa and other distant parts. [13]Lynda D. It was during a drunken argument in Brusselsthat Verlaine shot at Rimbaud, hitting him once in the wrist, and Rimbaudcalled in the police. 4. Rimbaud then traveled further afield,first across Europe and then to the Middle East and finally to Abyssinia.He had long since lost all interest in poetry and spent ten years as atrader, explorer, and gun-runner. Well, I have no only to put my imagination and my memories in the grave. Within a year or so, Rimbaud was disillusioned about hisrelationship with Verlaine. Theirsexual relationship was a scandal at the time, and Verlaine's wife wasdepicted as long-suffering. Once again, hefled to Paris in time to witness the bloody crushing of the Commune. Act II tells ofthe adventures of the boat on the high seas, during which it has a"hallucinatory vision of a transcendental reality which ordinary mortalshave only glimpsed in passing."[17] At this point, though, the voyage ofdiscovery undertaken by this boat begins to go wrong. The boat then surprisingly declares its nostalgiafor the ancient cities of Europe. The boat makes its way toward the sea. His mother was described by many as anauthoritarian figure who sheltered her two sons and did not let them playwith others in the village, one of the reasons why Rimbaud turned toliterature for an escape. The final two stanzas can also be seen assuggesting the development of a new self-awareness, and this further isconsidered evidence of a disillusionment with the seer view of the poet andas a foreshadowing of Rimbaud's later renunciation of poetry.[2 ] Rimbaud often wrote about the writing of poetry itself, or bout thefacility and value of words, or about the need for language in seekingcertain truths and in seeking some different vision of the world. The narrator works out avery different vision of the writing subject, which emerges as arelationship between cognition and the language of the text: As the narrator produces the story of the past or the present, he explicitly performs a reading which deflects the interest from the (pseudo)-referential content of the text and toward the operations of language. If it desires a return to European waters, it is to the cold, black puddle into which a sad, impoverished child releases a boat as frail as a May butterfly. In the case of Rimbaud, however, therelationship between his life and his work has become a focus because heseems to have lived in a way that expressed certain poetic and non-conforming attitudes, while it is also possible to find a number of linksbetween Rimbaud's life and certain images that recur in his poetry: "Arevolutionary both in his life and in his art, Rimbaud exerted a radicalinfluence on the scope and direction of French poetry."[1] As a poet,Rimbaud is considered innovative, and his accomplishment as a poet is allthe more remarkable considering how little he wrote and how young he waswhen he died. [6]Magill, 1334-1336. However, they were not compatible, and their relationshipended in July 1873 when, following a violent quarrel, Verlaine fired twiceon Rimbaud, wounding him slightly. InSeptember 1871, Rimbaud returned to Paris, where he met the poet Verlaine,and a poetic as well as a sexual relationship followed as the two wanderedaround Europe. "An Introduction to Rimbaud." The Rimbaud Pages (March 14, 1997), www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os tmc/comm.html.Rinaldi, Ray Mark. [11]Ibid., 1337. He called for a radically new vision of the mission of thepoet, seeing it as the essential task of the poet to give voice to theunconscious "other" hiding behind the mask of the rational, something thatcan be accomplished only by "a long, immense and reasoned derangement ofall the senses."[11] Rimbaud says that the poet must take an active roleand become a seer, and to do this, the poet must actively cultivate dreams,hallucinations, and even madness. The boat thenpasses through a ritual purification as its wooden shell is permeated byseawater and so cleansed of all soil left by the haulers. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This was the reason why he gave uppoetry and escaped to something he considered normalcy, though it might beargued that the real transgression came from his own nature and not fromhis poetry as such: Every writer sometimes entertains the fantasy of "giving up writing for ever", but Rimbaud actually did it--he pushed the artistic self- destruct button. "Rimbaud: The Dialectical Play of Presence and Absence." boundary 2, vol. 4 (July-August 194 ), 268-282.----------------------- [1]Fin Magill, Critical Survey of Poetry: Foreign Language Series Vol.4 (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Salem Press, 1992), 1334. He recognized the danger inherent inthis quest even as he knew the values he sought: I have created all the feasts, all the triumphs, all the dramas of the world. [2 ]Ibid., 1338. Verlaine was sent to prison for 18 months, andRimbaud finished his confession and linked it to his poetry, as noted. [9]Ibid., www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os tmc/comm.html. He read Plato, Ballance, Cabalist texts, and Buddhist scriptures in his search for a tradition that would support his sense of endowment by powers beyond himself. In Act I, the story isset on a vast river in the New World. More recently, his story has been resurrected in different forms, as RogerClarke noted in 1997: Last month, the Richard Alston Dance Company toured with Visions, a Rimbaudian inspired dance and, on her comeback tour last year, Patti Smith interrupted her show in London to read from the Rimbaud oeuvre. The guilt expressed in A Season in Hell derives from Rimbaud'slifestyle and particularly his now ended relationship with Verlaine. He was arrested there and thrown in jail.Later, he ran away to Brussels, only to be brought home. He had stopped writing poetry by thetime he was 2 . The film is an unflattering portrait of the poet as a young man, and, in turn, an inflated indictment of just about everything artistic at the turn of the century, especially the artists.[5]In this film, the love between the two men is shown as abusive and violentand ultimately damaging to both. Louis Post- Dispatch (November 5, 1995), 8C.St. It borrows from a variety of sources, includingVictor Hugo, Baudelaire, Jules Verne, and Vicomte Chateaubriand, amongothers. [15]McNeill, www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os tmc/comm.html. [1 ]Magill, 1336. Critical Survey of Poetry: Foreign Language Series Vol. "Rimbaud Mentality." Independent (March 31, 1997), 14.Magill, Fin. "The Autobiography of Rhetoric: On Reading Rimbaud's 'Une Saison En Enfer.'" French Forum, volume 9, No. Still others read it as simply a symbolist poem with the voyage of the boat as the rather banal central symbol of the human experience.[16] "The Drunken Boat" was composed in the summer of 1871 and presentedto Verlaine soon after. [4]Clarke, 14. In hisearliest poetry, he often attacked the petty restrictions of small townlife which he saw as working to frustrate his poetic ambitions.

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