11/06/2020
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) is regarded as one of France's most brilliant poets and twisted human beings. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. He ones wrote: "The poet makes himself a 'seer' by long, immense and rational derangement of all the sense. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence." Rimbaud was an angry, brooding man. He was easily bored and insatiably restless. Just as he was realizing his genus as a writer he abandoned it and set off for Indonesia, where he deserted from a mercenary force after 13 days, and the moved on to Africa, where he ran guns.
To Izambard Rimbaid wrote: “I’m now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I’m working at turning myself into a Seer. You won’t understand any of this, and I’m almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. And I’ve realized that I am a poet. It’s really not my fault.
That Rimbaud’s repudiation of poetry was as furious as the outpouring of his talent had once been was typical of a man whose life and work were characterized by violent contradictions. He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Sh*t on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”
Read about Arthur Rimbaud's career :
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/29/rebel-rebel
