page_title: Arthur Rimbaud
section_title: Poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Rimbaud / Poetry
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Rue Férou - Paris VI
context_page_description: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood he produced the bulk of his literary output, then completely stopped writing literature at the age of 20, after assembling his last major work, Illuminations.
  Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, having engaged in a hectic, at-times-violent romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years. After he stopped caring about literature, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant and explorer, until his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell, a precursor to modernist literature.
context_section_description: The first known poems of Arthur Rimbaud were mostly emulating the style of the Parnasse school and other famous contemporary poets like Victor Hugo, although he quickly developed an original approach, both thematically and stylistically (in particular by mixing profane words and ideas with sophisticated verse, as in "Vénus Anadyomène", "Oraison du soir" or "Les chercheuses de poux"). Later on, Rimbaud was prominently inspired by the work of Charles Baudelaire. This inspiration would help him create a style of poetry later labeled as symbolist.
  In May 1871, aged 16, Rimbaud wrote two letters explaining his poetic philosophy, commonly called the Lettres du voyant ("Letters of the Seer"). In the first, written 13 May to Izambard, Rimbaud explained:
  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. It's really not my fault.
  The second letter, written 15 May—before his first trip to Paris—to his friend Paul Demeny, expounded his revolutionary theories about poetry and life, while also denouncing some of the most famous poets that preceded him (reserving a particularly harsh criticism for Alfred de Musset, while holding Charles Baudelaire in high regard, although, according to Rimbaud, his vision was hampered by a too conventional style). Wishing for new poetic forms and ideas, he wrote:
  I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men.—For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul—which was rich to begin with—more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!
  Rimbaud expounded the same ideas in his poem "Le bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"). This hundred-line poem tells the tale of a boat that breaks free of human society when its handlers are killed by "Redskins" (Peaux-Rouges). At first thinking that it is drifting where it pleases, the boat soon realizes that it is being guided by and to the "poem of the sea". It sees visions both magnificent ("the awakening blue and yellow of singing phosphorescence", "l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs") and disgusting ("nets where in the reeds an entire Leviathan was rotting" "nasses / Où pourrit dans les joncs tout un Léviathan"). It ends floating and washed clean, wishing only to sink and become one with the sea.
  Archibald MacLeish has commented on this poem: "Anyone who doubts that poetry can say what prose cannot has only to read the so-called Lettres du Voyant and Bateau Ivre together. What is pretentious and adolescent in the Lettres is true in the poem—unanswerably true."
  While "Le bateau ivre" was still written in a mostly conventional style, despite its inventions, his later poems from 1872 (commonly called Derniers vers or Vers nouveaux et chansons, although he didn't give them a title) further deconstructed the french verse, introducing odd rhythms and loose rhyming schemes, with even more abstract and flimsy themes.
  After Une saison en enfer, his "prodigious psychological biography written in this diamond prose which is his exclusive property" (according to Paul Verlaine), a poetic prose in which he himself commented some of his verse poems from 1872
caption: The poem Le bateau ivre on a wall in Paris
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