Arthur Rimbaud accomplished one of the strangest feats in literary history. He transformed French poetry, influenced Symbolism and Surrealism, helped change the possibilities of poetic language, and produced works that writers would study for generations—and then he stopped writing poetry while still extraordinarily young.
Almost everything for which Rimbaud is remembered as a poet was written between his mid-teens and roughly the age of twenty. His literary career was so brief that it hardly resembles a career at all. Yet within those few years he produced The Drunken Boat, “Vowels,” A Season in Hell, and the prose poems later collected as Illuminations, works whose strange colors, fractured images, sensuality, violence, visionary intensity, and linguistic experimentation made him one of the most influential figures in modern poetry.
Born on October 20, 1854, in Charleville in northeastern France, Rimbaud seemed determined almost from adolescence to escape whatever world tried to contain him. He ran away from home, challenged religion and bourgeois respectability, rejected traditional poetic language, became involved in a turbulent relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, traveled restlessly across Europe, and eventually abandoned poetry altogether. He then spent much of his remaining life traveling and working far from France, particularly in Aden and the Horn of Africa.
Rimbaud died in Marseille in 1891 at only thirty-seven. By then, the poetry he no longer seemed interested in discussing had already begun creating the legend that would follow him long after his death.
🌿 Growing Up in Charleville
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born in Charleville, in the Ardennes region of France. His father, Frédéric Rimbaud, was an army officer who was largely absent from family life, while his mother, Marie-Catherine-Vitalie Cuif, raised Arthur and his siblings under a strict household regime.
Rimbaud was an exceptional student. His early academic work demonstrated a remarkable command of Latin and an ability to write verse with technical skill well before most young people would have begun imagining themselves as serious writers.
Yet academic success did not make him comfortable with the world surrounding him. Provincial Charleville increasingly seemed restrictive, and Rimbaud developed an intense hostility toward conventional morality, organized religion, middle-class respectability, and the expectations his mother attempted to impose upon him.
This conflict between discipline and rebellion would become fundamental to his early poetry. Rimbaud knew the traditional rules exceptionally well. That knowledge gave him the ability to break them deliberately.
📚 A Brilliant Student Who Wanted Out
Rimbaud’s early poems demonstrate just how thoroughly he had absorbed traditional French verse. He understood meter, rhyme, classical references, literary conventions, and the expectations surrounding what counted as appropriate poetic language.
But mastery quickly became insufficient.
Rimbaud wanted poetry to do something different.
He became increasingly impatient with the idea that certain subjects were poetic while others were vulgar, that particular forms had to be preserved because earlier writers had used them, or that a poet’s role was simply to produce beautifully arranged versions of familiar emotions.
He wanted poetry capable of disruption.
That ambition would eventually turn against even the forms he had mastered.
The traditional poet was expected to control language.
Rimbaud increasingly wanted language to produce experiences the poet himself could not completely control.
🚂 Running Away
The Franco-Prussian War interrupted Rimbaud’s formal education in 1870, but the disruption also intensified his desire to escape Charleville.
He repeatedly ran away.
On one journey to Paris, he was arrested after arriving without a valid ticket and briefly imprisoned. Other trips carried him through France and Belgium. His family and former teacher Georges Izambard repeatedly became involved in getting him home.
These journeys were not merely adolescent adventures.
Rimbaud was beginning to construct an identity around movement.
The road represented freedom from family, school, religion, work, provincial society, and almost every structure that appeared determined to define him.
The wandering adolescent soon became inseparable from the poetic persona.
Walking, hunger, cheap inns, railway stations, countryside, taverns, and temporary freedom appear throughout his early writing.
🥾 “My Bohemia”
One of the most charming expressions of the young Rimbaud’s fascination with wandering appears in “Ma Bohème,” generally known in English as “My Bohemia.”
The poem presents the young poet traveling with little money, worn clothing, and an almost ecstatic sense of freedom.
Poverty becomes romantic because it releases him from ordinary obligations.
The sky becomes a kind of shelter.
Walking becomes poetic activity.
The road becomes a place where imagination and physical experience merge.
Rimbaud would later move far beyond the relatively traditional structure of poems like “My Bohemia,” but the basic impulse remained.
He wanted to go elsewhere.
Geographically.
Socially.
Poetically.
Even spiritually.
Elsewhere became almost a permanent destination.
⚔️ War and “The Sleeper in the Valley”
The Franco-Prussian War also entered Rimbaud’s poetry.
One of his best-known early works, “Le Dormeur du val”—“The Sleeper in the Valley”—initially appears to describe a young soldier peacefully resting within an idyllic natural landscape.
Only gradually does the poem reveal that the soldier is dead.
The contrast between the beauty of the landscape and the violence concealed within it gives the poem extraordinary force. Nature appears peaceful while human beings kill one another inside it.
Rimbaud was still a teenager.
Yet the poem already demonstrates his ability to manipulate perception, directing the reader toward one interpretation before suddenly forcing a complete reconsideration of everything that came before.
That destabilizing effect would become increasingly central to his writing.
🔥 Paris, Revolution and Rejection
The upheavals surrounding the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune unfolded during Rimbaud’s formative years.
He responded passionately to revolutionary politics and despised many of the institutions associated with the French establishment. His poems attacked religion, militarism, bourgeois values, and hypocrisy with a ferocity that could be comic one moment and savage the next.
Rimbaud was drawn toward people who existed outside respectable society: workers, rebels, wanderers, the poor, children on the margins, drinkers, and bohemians.
His rebellion was political, but it was also aesthetic.
He wanted to destroy distinctions between respectable and unrespectable subjects.
A poet should be able to write about mud, bodily functions, drunkenness, sexuality, poverty, ugliness, hunger, and blasphemy.
Nothing needed to remain outside poetry.
👁️ The Poet as “Seer”
In letters written in May 1871 to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny, Rimbaud began outlining one of the most famous poetic ideas associated with his name.
He argued that the poet should become a voyant—a seer.
The poet would reach unknown forms of perception through what Rimbaud described as a systematic disordering or derangement of the senses.
This idea has sometimes been simplified into a celebration of drugs or reckless behavior.
Rimbaud’s argument was more radical than that.
He wanted the poet to dismantle ordinary habits of perception.
Language itself had become conventional.
People saw what they had been taught to see.
The poet’s task was to break through those habits and discover something beyond them.
Poetry should not merely describe reality.
It should change the way reality could be perceived.
🪞 “I Is Another”
One of Rimbaud’s most famous statements comes from these visionary letters: Je est un autre—usually translated as “I is another.”
The deliberately strange grammar is important.
Rimbaud was challenging the traditional idea of the poet as a stable individual expressing private feelings.
The poetic self could become something less secure.
The writer might become a medium through which unfamiliar voices, images, and experiences emerged.
This concept anticipated important developments in modern literature.
The self could be fragmented.
Identity could change.
Language might reveal things the conscious writer did not intend.
The poet was no longer simply standing outside the poem explaining himself.
The “I” itself had become uncertain.
🎨 “Vowels”
Few Rimbaud poems demonstrate his desire to disrupt ordinary perception more famously than “Voyelles,” or “Vowels.”
The poem associates vowels with colors and a succession of extraordinary images.
Rather than explaining these correspondences logically, Rimbaud creates a sensory system in which letters, colors, sounds, bodies, landscapes, and emotions interact.
Readers have spent generations trying to decode exactly what the colors mean.
That effort may miss part of the pleasure.
Rimbaud’s poetry often resists the assumption that an image must possess one stable interpretation.
A poem can create an experience before it provides an explanation.
Language can generate color, sound, texture, and association almost simultaneously.
The poem does not merely tell us something.
It alters the atmosphere inside the reader’s mind.
🚢 The Drunken Boat
Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre”—The Drunken Boat—became one of the defining poems of his early career.
The speaker is a boat that has broken free from the human beings controlling it and drifts through an increasingly fantastic series of oceans and visions.
At first, freedom appears exhilarating.
The boat escapes ordinary navigation and enters a world of dazzling colors, strange creatures, impossible landscapes, violent seas, and visionary experience.
Yet limitless freedom eventually becomes overwhelming.
The poem begins to reveal the exhaustion hidden inside transcendence.
The boat has escaped control, but it has also lost direction.
This tension captures something central to Rimbaud’s imagination.
He desired liberation intensely.
He also understood that destroying every boundary does not necessarily produce happiness.
Sometimes it produces another kind of captivity.
✉️ Writing to Paul Verlaine
By 1871, Rimbaud was desperate to enter the Paris literary world.
He sent poems to established writers, hoping someone would recognize what he was attempting.
One of those writers was Paul Verlaine.
Verlaine did more than respond.
He encouraged Rimbaud to come to Paris.
The seventeen-year-old poet arrived carrying manuscripts and entered a literary circle that was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by him.
Rimbaud possessed extraordinary talent.
He could also be abrasive, deliberately provocative, insulting, disruptive, and contemptuous of the social rituals surrounding literary life.
The provincial schoolboy had finally entered the cultural world he had imagined.
Almost immediately, he began causing chaos inside it.
❤️ Rimbaud and Verlaine
The relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine became one of the most famous and turbulent relationships in literary history.
Verlaine was older, married, and already established as a poet. Rimbaud was still a teenager.
Their relationship became romantic and sexual as well as literary.
They traveled together, drank heavily, argued violently, separated, reunited, and moved between France, Belgium, and England.
The relationship also contributed to the collapse of Verlaine’s marriage.
Yet it would be a mistake to treat the story only as literary scandal.
The two poets profoundly affected one another’s writing.
Rimbaud’s aggression toward conventional poetic language intersected with Verlaine’s interest in musicality, suggestion, atmosphere, and subtle rhythm.
For a period, their emotional and literary lives became nearly impossible to separate.
🌧️ London
Rimbaud and Verlaine spent significant periods in London during the early 1870s.
Victorian London gave Rimbaud another urban landscape dramatically different from Charleville or Paris.
The city offered fog, industry, crowded streets, docks, railways, poverty, commerce, and an international population.
These experiences contributed to the imaginative world of his later prose poems.
Rimbaud was fascinated by cities not merely as realistic settings but as unstable visual environments.
Buildings could become theatrical.
Factories could become dream structures.
Modern urban life could appear simultaneously exciting and nightmarish.
In the poems later collected as Illuminations, the modern city often seems less like a physical place than a vision continually constructing and destroying itself.
🔫 The Brussels Shooting
The relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine reached a violent crisis in Brussels in July 1873.
After repeated quarrels and threatened separations, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist with a revolver.
The injury was not fatal, but the incident effectively destroyed their relationship.
Verlaine was arrested and eventually sentenced to prison.
Rimbaud returned to his family’s property at Roche.
The episode has inevitably become part of the mythology surrounding both poets, but its importance should not obscure what Rimbaud was doing at almost exactly the same time.
He was creating one of his most extraordinary books.
🔥 A Season in Hell
Rimbaud completed Une Saison en enfer—A Season in Hell—in 1873.
He arranged for the book to be printed in Brussels, making it the only book-length work he personally oversaw into print.
A Season in Hell is difficult to classify.
It contains autobiography without being conventional autobiography, poetry without remaining conventional verse, confession without offering a reliable confessor, spiritual struggle without stable belief, and self-accusation mixed with theatrical performance.
The speaker examines rebellion, Christianity, sexuality, artistic ambition, failure, delusion, suffering, and the dream of discovering a new life.
Everything Rimbaud had believed about becoming a visionary poet seems to be placed on trial.
The writer appears to be interrogating his own rebellion.
Had poetic liberation produced freedom?
Or simply another illusion?
🪞 A Poet Arguing With Himself
One of the fascinating qualities of A Season in Hell is the unstable voice moving through it.
Rimbaud seems capable of believing and rejecting the same idea within a few pages.
He mocks Christianity and becomes fascinated by spiritual redemption.
He celebrates rebellion and accuses himself of foolishness.
He looks toward escape while recognizing that escape has repeatedly failed him.
The book therefore feels less like a manifesto than the destruction of several manifestos.
The young poet who had once declared that the writer must become a visionary now seems suspicious of his own vision.
This continual self-reinvention became one of Rimbaud’s defining qualities.
He could abandon an artistic identity almost as quickly as he created it.
🌃 Illuminations
The prose poems collected under the title Illuminations represent perhaps the most radical stage of Rimbaud’s poetic experimentation.
Their chronology is complicated. Some appear to have been written after A Season in Hell, which challenges the once-common idea that the earlier book represented his definitive farewell to poetry.
What matters more is what the poems accomplish.
Narrative becomes unstable.
Cities transform into visions.
Fairy tales collide with machinery.
Landscapes appear and vanish.
Language sometimes seems almost independent of ordinary logic.
The poems do not ask readers simply to interpret them.
They ask readers to enter them.
Illuminations helped create possibilities that later Symbolists, Surrealists, modernists, and experimental poets would explore much further.
🌇 The Modern City as Dream
Rimbaud’s cities often feel strangely contemporary.
They are crowded with architecture, commerce, movement, spectacle, technology, and human beings who appear almost swallowed by the environment around them.
Yet these are not realistic city sketches.
Buildings change scale.
Streets acquire impossible perspectives.
Modern life becomes dreamlike.
Rimbaud recognized that cities create sensory overload.
Advertisements, crowds, noise, transportation, lights, architecture, and merchandise compete constantly for attention.
The modern city becomes a machine for producing images.
That insight helps explain why writers and artists of the twentieth century found him so compelling.
He already seemed to be seeing the modern world before modernism fully arrived.
🌀 Language Without a Map
Rimbaud wanted to discover a new poetic language, and Illuminations shows how far he was prepared to go.
Traditional poetry often gives readers a recognizable structure.
A speaker speaks.
An event occurs.
An image represents something.
A conclusion arrives.
Rimbaud repeatedly removes those supports.
Images collide before the reader can stabilize them.
Connections remain uncertain.
The poem creates relationships through color, sound, rhythm, repetition, and atmosphere as readily as through explanation.
Reading Rimbaud therefore requires a different kind of attention.
Instead of asking immediately, “What does this mean?” it can be more useful first to ask, “What is this language doing?”
The experience comes before the solution.
Sometimes no final solution arrives.
🎭 Symbolism Before Symbolism
Rimbaud became one of the central precursors of French Symbolism, even though his own poetic career largely ended before Symbolism emerged as a clearly defined literary movement.
Symbolist writers rejected the idea that poetry should simply describe the visible world or deliver straightforward statements.
Suggestion mattered more than explanation.
Music mattered.
Dreams mattered.
Symbols did not necessarily possess one fixed meaning.
Rimbaud’s work anticipated these principles brilliantly.
A color could produce emotion.
A city could become a state of consciousness.
A boat could become a self without collapsing into a single tidy allegory.
Reality remained present, but language transformed it.
Later poets discovered in Rimbaud a model for escaping realism without abandoning intensity.
🎨 From Symbolism to Surrealism
Rimbaud’s influence became even more dramatic during the twentieth century.
The Surrealists recognized him as a predecessor because he had attempted to break the authority of rational consciousness and release unexpected combinations of images.
André Breton and others found in Rimbaud’s visionary program something close to their own desire to reach beneath conventional thought.
His influence did not stop with Surrealism.
Modern poets, novelists, musicians, visual artists, and countercultural figures repeatedly returned to him.
Rimbaud came to represent not simply a particular poetic style but an entire idea of artistic rebellion.
The young writer refuses society.
Refuses tradition.
Refuses respectable adulthood.
Creates something unprecedented.
Then disappears.
Few literary biographies lend themselves so easily to myth.
🚪 And Then He Stopped
The most astonishing fact about Rimbaud’s life remains the simplest.
He stopped writing poetry.
By roughly twenty or twenty-one, the literary career was essentially over.
There was no long middle period.
No mature volume produced at forty.
No collected late poems reflecting on youth.
No elderly poet revisiting the experiments of adolescence.
Rimbaud simply moved on.
Scholars have spent generations trying to explain why.
Perhaps poetry had exhausted its purpose for him.
Perhaps his artistic experiment had reached a dead end.
Perhaps practical life became more compelling.
Perhaps he wanted to escape the identity everyone else was beginning to associate with him.
No explanation is completely satisfying.
The silence remains part of the mystery.
🥾 The Man Who Kept Moving
After abandoning literature, Rimbaud continued the restless movement that had characterized his adolescence.
He traveled through Europe and beyond, spending time in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Java, Cyprus, Aden, and the Horn of Africa.
He took jobs.
Learned languages.
Explored commercial possibilities.
Worked as a foreman.
Traveled through difficult terrain.
Bought and sold goods.
Corresponded with his family about money, business, equipment, travel, and practical matters.
The visionary poet appears to disappear from the letters.
In his place is a businessman and traveler concerned with costs, shipments, weather, markets, and logistics.
The contrast has fascinated readers ever since.
🌍 Aden and Harar
By the 1880s, Rimbaud had established himself in the commercial world connecting Aden, on the Arabian Peninsula, with areas of East Africa.
He worked for trading firms and later conducted business independently, particularly in and around Harar in what is now Ethiopia.
The landscape could hardly have been further from the provincial French town he had spent his youth trying to escape.
Yet there is something oddly consistent about the move.
The adolescent Rimbaud had always wanted elsewhere.
Now he had reached it.
The difference was that he no longer appeared interested in turning experience into poetry.
The man traveling through landscapes most European writers could only imagine did not seem tempted to resurrect the visionary poet.
📬 The Silence of Rimbaud
Rimbaud’s abandonment of literature became so famous that critics sometimes refer to the “silence of Rimbaud.”
The phrase captures the almost unbelievable contrast between his early achievement and everything that followed.
His surviving correspondence from his later years is largely practical.
He rarely appears nostalgic about poetry.
There is little evidence that he spent his African years secretly composing a lost masterpiece or longing to return to literary life.
Meanwhile, back in Europe, his reputation was beginning to grow.
Paul Verlaine included Rimbaud among the poètes maudits—the “accursed poets”—and helped publish work that had remained scattered or unpublished.
The poet became famous while the man who had written the poems was busy doing something else thousands of miles away.
📖 Becoming Rimbaud Without Rimbaud
This strange separation between writer and reputation became one of the defining features of Rimbaud’s legacy.
Literary culture created “Rimbaud” while Arthur Rimbaud himself was largely absent.
The figure who emerged was irresistible.
The teenage genius.
The runaway.
The rebel.
The lover of Verlaine.
The visionary.
The scandal.
The poet who burned brilliantly and vanished.
Some of this mythology grows naturally from documented events.
Some was amplified by later writers eager to transform Rimbaud into a symbol of artistic rebellion.
The real person was inevitably more complicated.
He could be visionary and practical.
Rebellious and commercially ambitious.
Contemptuous of bourgeois life as a teenager and intensely concerned with making money as an adult.
Human beings are allowed to contradict the myths made from them.
🦵 Illness and the Return to France
In 1891, Rimbaud developed a serious problem with his right knee while abroad.
He returned to France for medical treatment and entered a hospital in Marseille, where his leg was amputated.
His condition continued to deteriorate.
After spending a period with his family, he returned to Marseille, where he was diagnosed with cancer.
Arthur Rimbaud died there on November 10, 1891.
He was thirty-seven years old.
The poet who had abandoned literature before most writers have found their voice had been silent for roughly half his life.
He was buried in Charleville.
🏠 The House of the Poet Who Wanted to Leave
Charleville-Mézières now preserves Rimbaud’s memory with an intensity the young poet himself might have found ironic.
The Musée Arthur Rimbaud occupies a historic mill near the Meuse and holds manuscripts, photographs, personal objects, and material relating to his life and influence.
Nearby stands the Maison des Ailleurs—the House of Elsewheres—the building where Rimbaud lived with his family during the crucial years of his adolescence.
The name could hardly be more appropriate.
Rimbaud spent his youth wanting to be elsewhere.
Paris.
Belgium.
London.
Java.
Aden.
Harar.
Anywhere but the place attempting to contain him.
Yet the city he escaped eventually became one of the principal places preserving his memory.
🧑🎤 Rimbaud and the Cult of the Young Rebel
Rimbaud’s influence reaches far beyond poetry partly because his life created such a powerful cultural archetype.
The brilliant adolescent rejects ordinary society.
He refuses authority.
He experiments with identity.
He pursues art with frightening intensity.
Then, rather than settling into respectable artistic adulthood, he walks away.
That story has appealed particularly strongly to musicians and countercultural artists.
Rimbaud’s name has appeared repeatedly in discussions of rock music, punk, Beat literature, experimental art, and artistic rebellion.
But there is a danger in romanticizing the myth too completely.
The real Rimbaud experienced poverty, conflict, injury, illness, difficult relationships, exhausting travel, and premature death.
Rebellion was not merely stylish.
It had consequences.
✍️ The Poet Who Refused to Become a Professional Poet
Perhaps the strangest thing about Rimbaud is that he never became what literary history eventually decided he was.
A major poet.
He did not build a conventional literary career.
He did not spend decades cultivating publishers.
He did not carefully shape a public authorial identity.
He did not produce memoirs explaining his artistic principles in old age.
He did not deliver lectures about his youthful masterpieces.
He did not supervise definitive collected editions.
Most of his reputation was constructed after he had already stopped participating in literature.
This separates Rimbaud from almost every other canonical poet.
His work became monumental without his cooperation.
🔥 A Season in Hell and the Question of Goodbye
Readers have often treated A Season in Hell as Rimbaud’s farewell to literature.
The interpretation is tempting because the book repeatedly stages the collapse of earlier dreams and artistic identities.
Yet the chronology is not completely that simple. At least some of the prose poems associated with Illuminations appear to have been written after A Season in Hell.
Rimbaud’s departure from poetry may therefore have been gradual rather than a single dramatic renunciation.
This uncertainty actually suits him.
A clean ending would almost be too orderly.
Rimbaud’s poetry continually rejects stable narratives.
His disappearance from poetry does the same.
🧠 Why Rimbaud Still Feels Modern
Many nineteenth-century poets sound immediately nineteenth-century.
Rimbaud can sound startlingly modern.
His rapid images resemble cinematic editing.
His cities anticipate surreal urban landscapes.
His unstable speakers anticipate modernist experiments with identity.
His insistence that the self is not singular feels surprisingly contemporary.
His willingness to fracture language anticipates much later avant-garde poetry.
Even his refusal to explain himself feels modern.
Rimbaud does not always guide readers politely from one image to another.
He expects them to experience disorientation.
That disorientation is part of the work.
🌈 A Poetry of Sensation
Rimbaud’s writing often overwhelms the senses.
Colors flare.
Water moves.
Cities glitter.
Bodies sweat.
Metal shines.
Flowers appear beside machinery.
Sound becomes visual.
Letters become colors.
The natural world and built environment continually transform into one another.
This sensory excess is one reason translation poses such a challenge.
Rimbaud’s effects depend not simply upon meaning but upon the precise sound and texture of French words, their rhythms, associations, and collisions.
No translation can reproduce all of that.
Yet translators continue trying because the imaginative force remains irresistible.
Every new version becomes another attempt to carry Rimbaud’s strange language across a border.
📚 The Extraordinary Smallness of the Work
Rimbaud’s literary reputation is especially remarkable when compared with the quantity of work he produced.
There is no enormous shelf of novels.
No sixty-year poetic career.
No endless series of collected essays.
Instead, there is a relatively compact body of writing created during a few extraordinarily concentrated years.
That smallness can make the work seem even more intense.
Almost every stage appears transitional.
The technically accomplished schoolboy gives way to the rebellious adolescent.
The adolescent poet becomes the visionary.
Traditional verse begins dissolving.
Prose poetry takes over.
Then the writer disappears.
Reading Rimbaud chronologically feels less like following a career than watching a series of explosions.
✨ Why Arthur Rimbaud Still Matters
Arthur Rimbaud matters because he refused to accept that poetry had to speak in the language previous generations had given it.
He wanted another language.
He wanted poetry capable of reaching experiences ordinary description could not contain.
That desire led him toward color, dream, fragmentation, sensory confusion, eroticism, blasphemy, urban spectacle, visionary imagery, and prose poetry that often seems to dissolve the border between external reality and the mind perceiving it.
Later writers recognized the possibilities immediately.
Symbolists found in Rimbaud a language of suggestion.
Surrealists found a precursor to their exploration of dream and the unconscious.
Modernists found fragmented perception.
Countercultural artists found the archetype of the rebel who refused respectable adulthood.
Yet Rimbaud remains larger than the movements that claimed him.
He was already leaving them behind before they existed.
🌟 The Poet Who Walked Away
Perhaps no question surrounding Arthur Rimbaud is more compelling than the one his poems cannot answer.
Why did he stop?
A person capable of producing The Drunken Boat, A Season in Hell, and Illuminations before reaching twenty-one might have transformed literature repeatedly over another fifty years.
Instead, Rimbaud chose another life.
Or perhaps he simply discovered that poetry belonged to the life he had already outgrown.
There is something almost impossible for literary culture to accept about that possibility. Readers want the great poet to recognize the greatness of poetry. We want him to understand the importance of what he created.
Rimbaud did not owe literature that ending.
He wrote.
He transformed the language available to him.
Then he left.
The silence that followed has become almost as famous as the poems themselves, but the silence should not overshadow the achievement. In only a handful of years, Arthur Rimbaud helped open doors through which much of modern poetry would later pass.
He wanted to find a new language.
More than a century later, writers are still discovering what he found.
Lives
I
Oh! the huge avenues of the holy land, the terraces of the temple! What has happened to the brahmin who taught me the Proverbs? From then and from there I can still see even the old women! I remember silvery hours and sun near rivers, the hand of the country on my shoulder, and our caresses as we stood in the fiery fields. —A flight of red pigeons thunders around my thoughts—In exile here I had a stage on which to perform the dramatic masterpieces of all literatures. I might tell you about unheard-of wealth. I follow the story of the treasures you found. I see the next chapter! My wisdom is as neglected as chaos is. What is my void, compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?
II
I am a far more deserving inventor than all those who went before me; a musician, in fact, who found something resembling the key of love. At present, a noble from a meager countryside with a dark sky I try to feel emotion over the memory of mendicant childhood, over my apprenticeship when I arrived wearing wooden shoes, polemics, five or six widowings, and a few wild escapades when my strong head kept me from rising to the same pitch as my comrades. I don’t miss what I once possessed of divine happiness: the calm of this despondent countryside gives a new vigor to my terrible scepticism. But since this scepticism can no longer be put into effect, and since I am now given over to a new worry—I expect to become a very wicked fool.
III
In an attic where at the age of twelve I was locked up, I knew the world and illustrated the human comedy. In a wine cellar I learned history. At some night celebration, in a northern city, I met all the wives of former painters. In an old back street in Paris I was taught the classical sciences. In a magnificent palace, surrounded by all the Orient, I finished my long work and spent my celebrated retirement. I have invigorated my blood. I am released from my duty. I must not even think of that any longer. I am really from beyond the tomb, and without work.
-Arthur Rimbaud, from Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie.
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