 "Photo:")
 "Photo:")
Had French poet Arthur Rimbaud been alive in the last 50 years or so, he would have been a rock musician. And from all indications, he would have had a lot of fans.
Bob Dylan has repeatedly cited him as the key influence in his "chains of flashing images" lyrical style of the mid-'60s. Jim Morrison commonly signed autographs using his name, and wrote a fan letter thanking Rimbaud translator Wallace Fowlie. He inspired Patti Smith to quit her New Jersey factory job and start a rock band. Kurt Cobain named him as one of his favorite poets, and his widow, Courtney Love, read several of Rimbaud's prose poems at his funeral.
The real Arthur Rimbaud was born 151 years ago today in Charleville, a town in eastern France just miles from the Belgian border. He was a conspicuously good student, composing Latin verse in his classes with astonishing rapidity and winning nearly all the prizes awarded in his school's annual academic competitions.
At age 14, Rimbaud began increasingly turning his attention to composing French verse. His first attempts were, in general, unremarkable - technically brilliant but otherwise uninspired imitations of Victor Hugo and other notable poets of his day.
The real breakthrough came in 1870 with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. With nearly all of Charleville's teachers serving in the war, the town's schools were closed for the fall term, and Rimbaud, who had grown to become increasingly revolted by the provinciality of his hometown, was transformed in these months of idleness from its prized pupil to its chief rebel. He wandered through Charleville, his greasy hair grown down to his shoulders, scrawling obscene graffiti on park benches and smoking his pipe upside-down, which for some reason was considered the most scandalous of the three.
Accompanying this newfound bohemianism, Rimbaud made a complete break with the influences that had fueled his early poetry. He wrote brilliant invectives against the flowery style of contemporary French poetry, wicked satires of his quaint hometown, polemics against the war, condemnations of religion and, especially, scathing attacks on his pious, domineering mother.
What is most amazing is the tenderness and lyrical subtlety with which he did so, concealing a wealth of hidden meaning beneath the seeming simplicity of these poems. In "The Poet at Seven Years," Rimbaud contrasts his mother's petty tyrannies, and his quiet rebellions against them, with the first stirrings of his adolescent fantasy, imagining fantastic adventures and sea voyages from the quiet of his playroom.
Invigorated by these early poetic triumphs, Rimbaud began to grow even more disgusted with his life in Charleville. He made several attempts to run away, following a friendly school teacher who was serving in Belgium, but was caught and returned to face his mother's wrath each time.
Desperate, Rimbaud wrote two letters to the poet Paul Verlaine in Paris, enclosing several poems in his pleas for help in escaping Charleville. Verlaine, who was duly impressed with the skill of the young poet, wrote back immediately, saying: "My dear soul, come at once. You are summoned. You are expected."
The newly married Verlaine and his wife, Mathilde, had recently moved in to her parents' home in an attempt to wean the middle-aged poet from his fondness for drink and, more importantly, his predilection for teenage boys. But when he learned that his young protegee was only seventeen - and not, as he had been lead to believe, in his mid-twenties - it was far too much for a man of his limited willpower to resist. The two embarked on a torrid love affair that would last for most of the next three years, and which Rimbaud would later chronicle in his brilliant intellectual autobiography, "A Season In Hell."
For a few months Rimbaud and Verlaine made the rounds in the Paris cafes, mocking the smug self-satisfaction of its writers, driving a wedge between Mathilde's parents with their antics and in general making themselves the scandal of Parisian literary society. Under intense pressure from his in-laws to shape up or ship out, Verlaine, with much persuasion from Rimbaud, opted for the latter. For the next two years, the poets would divide their time between Paris, Brussels, London and Charleville, living off of Verlaine's inheritance in a series of bars and cold water flats.
Unlike the deliberately provocative writings of Rimbaud, Verlaine's poetry, at least until the two met, consisted mainly of love poems to his wife, incredible less for their themes than for their unprecedented level of technical innovation. Under his influence, Rimbaud's poetry became not only more technically experimental, but more poised and meditative.
Combining this with his increasing interest in mysticism, Rimbaud's poems took on a surreal, hyper-aesthetic edge, combining recollected events from his childhood with a visionary perceptivity for detail. In the poem "Memory," perhaps his greatest lyric, he delivers a cascading series of elliptical recollections from childhood, densely packed with detail and written in a carefully disordered style that brilliantly conveyed its hazy remembrances of things past.
But despite the success of their collaboration, the sadistic, domineering Rimbaud and the hyper-passive Verlaine were simply too volatile a combination to make their poetic marriage last for more than a brief period. When Rimbaud finally resolved to leave Verlaine in 1874 to return to Charleville and finish the half-completed "Season In Hell," Verlaine shot him in a fit of desperation. He was later arrested, and when the nature of the two poets' relationship became apparent to the Brussels authorities, he was sentenced to two years' hard labor for attempted manslaughter.
After finishing "Season," Rimbaud would go on to complete what would be the first book of prose poems in the French language, "Illuminations." At 19 years old, he gave up writing poetry for the rest of his life, spending a few years traveling and learning languages in Europe before resettling in East Africa. He spent the next 15 years in Ethiopia, working as an engineer, gun runner and, it is alleged, slave trader, before dying of cancer in 1891.
While it is easy in some sense to dismiss Rimbaud as the arch-rebel of French letters or the teenage poet laureate, to do so would be to miss not only the incredible depth and richness of his poems, but the central importance of his place in the history of French poetry.
Rimbaud's poems would go largely unrecognized for several decades after his death. But when, largely because of Verlaine's advocacy, they were rediscovered by Paris' young intellectuals near the turn of the century, he very quickly became the driving force behind the French symbolist and surrealist movements that would dominate the nation's verse well into the next century.
But beyond any question of influence, Rimbaud's importance as a poet rests primarily in his effortless combination of subjective, personal detail with the visionary self-mythology that he crafted around it. That he did so with such deceptive simplicity is unprecedented not only for a poet of his extreme youth, but for a poet of any age.
From "Memory" by Arthur Rimbaud Translated by Wallace Fowlie
Rimbaud's 1872 poem "Memory" draws on events from his childhood in rural France and delivers them in an extraordinarily brisk meter that evokes the elliptical, dreamlike nature of memory itself.
I Clear water; like the salt of childhood tears; The assault on the sun by the whiteness of women's bodies; the silk of banners, in masses and of pure lilies, under the walls a maid once defended.
The play of angels - No... the golden current on it's way moves its arms, black and heavy, and above all cool, with grass. She, dark, having the blue sky as a canopy, calls up for curtains the shadow of the hill and the arch.
...
III Madame stands too straight in the field nearby where the filaments from the work snow down; the parasol in her fingers; stepping on the white flower, too proud for her; children reading in the flowering grass
their book of red morocco. Alas, he, like a thousand white angels separating on the road, goes off beyond the mountain! She, all cold and dark, runs! after the departing man!
2 comments