Dear readers, we continue our work on the life and work of the great poet Arthur Rimbaud (see previous post), in which we present his biographical synthesis and advance some general considerations. Here we will pick them up and go on to deal with his work.

_{Fragment Source}

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As Balakian has said, "Rimbaud's main interest lies in the "poem of his life". Whoever showed an almost total disinterest in the diffusion of his poems, puts the poet's life first, more broadly, the life of man, says Todó. The previous Symbolist poets had shown a lack of interest in everyday or historical life. We find in Rimbaud a capital sentence in this respect: "The real life is absent". For Rimbaud it will not be about changing society or the world, but about "changing life".

Hence his celebration of the body, of pleasures, of forms of love, and a vindication of primal energy, that which feeds enthusiasm and confronts mediocrity and submission, which he identified with Christianity (ahead of Nietzsche). That is why he has been characterized as solar, pantheistic and frank, beyond the hermeticism of his poetry.

Another general aspect of interest of his work is its characterization as a deliberate poet, in what would coincide with Baudelaire, poet already approached by me in this blog (I indicate only the last article) and Mallarmé (poet that we will deal with in the next posts), that is, poets with an eagerness for their work and conscious and lucid regarding their personal creative possibilities, as Balakian points out. That is why we will find in Rimbaud, as in few poets of his time, an enunciative vision (almost of a manifesto or proclamation) in certain of his texts (his letters), as we shall see.

Finally, the forward-looking vision (futuristic, one might call it, although the denomination is not very exact). Rimbaud, even at his early age, was aware of the irruption that his work meant in the literature of the time, and how he was committed to the future of poetry, which was proved, as we have said, not only in his claim by Surrealism, but in all contemporary poetry.

A poetic work for the future

_{Caricature of Rimbaud drawn by Verlaine in 1872. Source}

While it could be indicated that there is in Rimbaud's poetic production, a first stage until mid 1871, which critics qualify as intelligible, the second stage is considered dark and airtight, but this is the main one, which would include loose poems such as his sonnet "Vowels" and "The Drunk Ship"; then the substantial work A Season in Hell and the lesser known, but of great relevance to modern poetry, Luminations. We will dedicate ourselves to the second stage, but first we will stop at his Letters of the Seer, texts of immeasurable influences.

Letters from the seer

The so-called Letters of the Seer, the name given to him very later, are not only the most important of his letters, but also the texts containing Rimbaud's poetics (vision of poetry). Under that name are collected an epistle to his professor Georges Izambard and another to his friend Paul Demeny, written in May 1871, at the time of the events of the so-called Paris Commune, when Rimbaud had not come to Paris. From these letters ([French version]1) and 2, we will highlight some of their main aspects (which are many).

Although it is difficult to choose, in such rich texts, let us see some fragments:

Because I am another (...) I witness the emergence of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it: I throw a bow and arrow: the symphony moves in the depths, or comes from a leap on the stage.

In this fragment is perhaps Rimbaud's most transcendent phrase. Note that it does not say "I am another", but "I am another"; bursting against French grammar (je suis - tu es), Rimbaud's phrase initiates the entire long modern tradition that differentiates the author (personal, empirical) from the speaker's voice in the poem (the third person). That fundamental line that had, for example, later concretion in the thesis of the impersonality of Pound and Eliot.

The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is his own knowledge, his totality; he searches for his soul, inspects it, tempts it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it; it seems simple (...)

Perhaps returning to the old Socratic consciousness, so studious of Greek culture (there are fragments of the letter that I cannot reproduce where it can be verified) as it was, Rimbaud raises the need to overcome that easy attitude of "romanticism" by questioning that it only remains in the immediate emotion, and enter the depths of the individual being, perhaps in its shadow. Hence, in a later paragraph, it says: "Imagine a man implanting a wart on his face!

_Source

I say you have to be a seer.

This is another essential phrase. Rimbaud, in line with what Baudelaire had expressed years earlier with his image of the poet as "visionary", constructs, in a laconic phrase, the modern vision of poetry. To see beyond the easy and established, the apparent... And to announce/denounce what may be. It is difficult to find such an impeccable phrase as this to announce what poetry is and must be.

The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense and reasoned interruption of all the senses.

To a great extent, it will be the exercise of a search and expression of what Rimbaud said: the abssurd, the confluence of the inorganic and its opposite, the divided, dissociated self, which we are, but which is capable of announcing the enormity and complexity that we are, what modern poetry will become.

This language will be from the soul to the soul, summarizing everything, perfumes, sounds, colors, thought trapping the thought (...). The poet would define the amount of awakening unknown in his time in the universal soul!

Another of Rimbaud's transcendent affirmations, with whom it is synthesized here, especially what, without a doubt, is poetry, as a textual genre. Beyond the presence of the sensory, which will gain with the poetry of Rimbaud and others, great relevance, from then on, the most transcendental is the function. Rimbaud thinks that it must fulfill: to announce, as one who opens one's eyes, what is new in who we are.

These poets will be! When a woman's infinite slavery is broken, when she lives for herself and for her, the man, until now abominable, - after having dismissed her, she too will be a poet! The woman will find something unknown! Will her worlds of ideas be different from ours? - She will find things strange, unfathomable, repugnant, delicious; we will take them, we will understand them.

It is so significant that the most definitive poet of modernity points out the need for women to assume their participation in all possible fields.

To conclude, provisionally, we have in Rimbaud one of the most lucid authors of modernity.

(This work will continue.)