Rimbaud ceased to write poetry when he was 21. Up to that point, some consider the poetry he wrote started off modern poetry. He wrote of subjects that few poets had touched on before-initiating poets like Ginsberg.
Nevertheless, he sometimes reminds me of Villon in both his choice of subject matter and life-style.
Until he broke con Verlaine, he was a great poet, the one that gave color to the letters, but further on, he became a gun dealer in Ethiopia.
Yes, Fred, but does that reflect on the value of his poetry? Was that greatness one of theme or vocabulary? Like I wrote, did not Villon precede him?
Of course Villon precede him, so do Ronsard, but giving a color to letters was very and totally pre-impressionist and is totally specific from Rimbaud. He inspired himself on painters he was drinking absenta with but he created something that still inspire all of us: giving colors to letters.
One of the most innovative poets of the end of 19 century. You can read Illuminations or Une saison en Enfer comparing with Baudelaire and Verlaine.
Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunk Boat) merges metaphorical rhetoric with the argot of ordinary mundane perception to create a transcendent sort of reality, a language that is hallucinating and hallucinated, losing ego in the ocean of consciousness, merging the inanimate with the animate. It has been translated into many different versions - I have translated it myself. As for absinthe, here is my own cautionary poem:
Absinthe
Beware the Seas of Art, Rimbaud--
Bateaux Ivres dat way go!
His drowned men bobbing upside down
play the clown and cannot frown!
Virtue boys reject Verlaine--
absinthe and Eros honed his sin!
Jarry and Van Gogh died awfully young-
-their greens by wormwood’s green were stung!
Drinking absinthe makes wit wry
then sucks all color from the dye
reams your marrow till your boned eyes dry
turns your bile to caustic lye--
makes you art, then makes you die!
Rimbaud did reject absinthe when he also quit writing poetry at 21, and became a successful arms trader and coffee exporter. He grew up and died a devout Catholic, which may surprise those who celebrate his defiant hedonism. Clearly he saw no contradictions there, but believed that a poet must torment one's consciousness-- e.g. with with absinthe and hashish -- to induce visions, sufferings and revelations, rivaling the suffering of those who engaged in sterile self-flagellation while producing neither art nor shareable insight. Not that I recommend either path. :)
Yes. thanks. I must reread his poems again as I haven't read them for a couple of years, but I was fascinated by him as a teenager. Fascinated by him as a poet and by his rejection of that part of him. Did his ability die? Did he destroy his poetic self as he destroyed his bourgeoise self (only to return to the latter before death)?
I think it was a Miserable Miracle (Henri Michaux) sort of thing for him -- an adventure- and when he got sick of Verlaine and chaos- Verlaine actually shot him in the wrist with a real live gun -- he decided to go outward rather than inward. He continued to write great letters, so my answer would be that he did not destroy his poetic self and I doubt if he ever rejected the extraordinary in favor of the bourgeois (though I think that sense of bourgeois is too global and thus potentially libelous.) Signed, Un Bourgeois :)
My memory of him was like that Jim, that he rejected his bourgeois life in a small town and returned to his mother to die. I think its a reasonable assessment. Writing letters no matter how great does not necessarily amount to a poetic-self, as conceived then and of course by the later Dylan Thomas. He was a boy and man of extremes, pushing against and into life, so I stand by my interpretation. How bourgeois was considered then is not necessarily pertinent now as the boundaries between stability and bohemianism have become blurred-and Rimbaud was about breaking rules. He married a black woman after all. He became a slaver, perhaps going against his own and others morality. It may be that the quest for an existentialist lifestyle (a kind of romanticism) is no longer understood because we have as a culture removed it from our system-Flaubert, Baudelaire, to the Beats and Ginsberg. For the later writers, Rimbaud remained an icon of talent and behaviour.
I don't disagree with your assessment of in and out (does he express something like that in his letters?) but that sounds to me like more recent psychology not necessarily of the period. Was the word interiority ever employed then? I can't remember ever seeing it. I cannot remember Thomas ever using it either and not until Plath and Lowell did poets use it.
You may well be right, hard to time-travel to that culture. However I don't know where your term interiority is coming from unless from my word inward. I don't think I have ever deployed that term. That inward-outward speculation was not a psychology-aimed comment, but rather a speculation as to why he changed course so radically. I had heard about the slaver part but forgot since Wikipedia seems to have omitted (or sanitized?) that part. Also I knew Baudelaire lived with Jeanne Duval (Black Venus as she was termed by Baudelaire's mother) but did not know Rimbaud did the same. I had always thought France was less racist (Josephine Baker, et al.) I have learned from you today.
As I from you.
I looked at some of his letters. One was extremely good putting forward his attitudes to his old schoolteacher. Exactly, I think as I remembered. He saw himself within the tradition of Flaubert and Baudelaire.
The interiority I referred to is simply a term for a particular psychological construct (to use such terms) which are rarely visible from time period to time period. In the past someone might have referenced such a change differently-and simply would not have been the same mindset that we understand now. He might have used entirely other terms. A slaver is surely the opposite of the bourgeois (Flaubert/Baudelaire)represented by his mother and school. In that sense, the poet survived as the renegade-in his eyes. He still was obdurate about not conforming, not being according to the demands of his potential and intelligence. Thereby exhibiting a courage that moved towards annihilation (existentialist viewpoint). I think, given his intelligence, that is what he thought.
Maybe. Or he was just simply a wastrel and bad man who once had been a poet?
Rimbuad wrote A remarkable poem A season in hell , in which he personified his hallucinations
The beginning of...….
A Season in Hell
Arthur Rimbaud, 1854 - 1891
A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.
One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.
I armed myself against justice.
I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure’s been turned over to you!
I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.
I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.
And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.
So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk! it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.
Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!
“You’ll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who’d crowned me with such pretty poppies. “Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!”
Ah! I’ve been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye! and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer, let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.
Yes, Rambo was a great poet with his topics that he chooses and focuses on a lot
Rimbaud é famoso por escrever poesia tão lindas e profundas com tão pouca idade. acho que vale a pena conhecer o que ele deixou em sua passagem rápida pela terra, conhecer sua poesia, sua biografia conturbada, em termos de juventude, alegria de viver e ótimos trabalhos artísticos, ele perde, mas sua trajetória parece com a de Amadeus Mozart
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