Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (born October 20, 1854, Charleville, France—died November 10, 1891, Marseille) was a French poet and adventurer who won renown in the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.

Childhood

Rimbaud grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern France. He was the second son of an army captain and a local farmer’s daughter. The father spent little time with the family and eventually abandoned the children to the sole care of their mother, a strong-willed, bigoted woman who pinned all her ambitions on her younger son, Arthur. Outwardly pious and obedient, he was a child prodigy and a model pupil who astonished the teachers at the Collège de Charleville by his brilliance in all subjects, especially literature. Rimbaud was a voracious reader who soon familiarized himself with the major French writers of both the past and present. He had a particular talent for Latin verse, and in August 1870 he won the first prize for a Latin poem at the Concours Académique. (His first published poem had appeared in January 1870 in La Revue pour Tous.) Rimbaud seemed obsessed with poetry, spending hours juggling with rhyme. This firm grounding in the craft of versification gave him a complete, even arrogant confidence and an ambition to be acknowledged by the currently fashionable Parnassian poets, of whom he was soon producing virtuoso pastiches.

In his 16th year Rimbaud found his own distinctive voice in poems whose sentiments swing between two extremes: revolt against a repressive hometown environment, and a passionate desire for freedom and adventure. All of the unhappy adolescent’s loathing and longing are in these poems, which are already remarkable works. They express his disgust with the constraints of small-town life, its hypocrisies, its self-satisfaction and apathy. The cliches of sentimentality, and, increasingly, religion itself become the targets of fierce cynicism. Equally ringing is the lyrical language that voices Rimbaud’s yearning for freedom and transcendence. Based on exquisitely perceived sense impressions, the imagery in these poems expresses a longing for sensual union with the natural world. These early poems are characteristically Rimbaldian in their directness and power.

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Rimbaud had begun taking a keen interest in politics by the time the Franco-German War began in July 1870. Upon the war’s outbreak the school in Charleville closed, an event that marked the end of his formal education. The war served to intensify Rimbaud’s rebelliousness; the elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even hallucinatory. Reading widely in the town library, Rimbaud soon became involved with revolutionary socialist theory. In an impulsive attempt to put his hopes for revolution into practice, he ran away to Paris that August but was arrested at the station for traveling without a ticket. After a brief spell in prison, he wandered through northern France and Belgium for several months. His mother had him brought back to Charleville by the police, but in February 1871 he again ran off to Paris as a volunteer in the forces of the Paris Commune, which was then under siege by regular French troops. After a frustrating three weeks there, he returned home just before the Paris Commune was mercilessly suppressed.

The collapse of his passionately felt political ideals seems to have been a turning point for Rimbaud. From now on, he declares in two important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), he has given up the idea of “work” (i.e., action) and, having acknowledged his true vocation, will devote himself with all his energy to his role as a poet.

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Poetic vision

Rimbaud wanted to serve as a prophet, a visionary, or, as he put it, a voyant (“seer”). He had come to believe in a universal life force that informs or underlies all matter. This spiritual force, which Rimbaud referred to simply as “l’inconnu” (“the unknown”), can be sensed only by a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to “see” this spiritual unknown and allowing his individual consciousness to be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument. He should then be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social progress. Rimbaud had not given up his social ideals, but now intended to realize them through poetry. First, though, he had to qualify himself for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method: “le dérèglement de tous les sens” (“the derangement of all the senses”). Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of his senses so that he could attain visions of the “unknown.” In a voluntary martyrdom he would subject himself to fasting and pain, imbibe alcohol and drugs, and even cultivate hallucination and madness in order to expand his consciousness.

In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine the form of his poems, and if the visions were formless, then the poems would be too. He began allowing images and their associations to determine the structure of his new poems, such as the mysterious sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels”).

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