RE: ADSactly Poetry: Arthur Rimbaud, The Seer Poet of Modernity (Part II)
For Rimbaud it will not be about changing society or the world, but about "changing life"
This was the perception I had when I read this young genius. As I commented in the previous post, I can sympathize with his resistance to humans' wiring. Changing life may go in either direction, although I guess he'd favor changing societal rules, since there is nothing intrinsically wrong about our biology. It is in the incompatibility of our biology and our social rules where the source of our misery resides.
I can also understand his opposition to "mediocrity and submission, which he identified with Christianity"; religions in general and any dogmatic belief can promote submission, which runs counter human nature.
I got a bit confused here:
Note that it does not say "I am another", but "I am another"
yo es otro is the spanish translation, right?. Should it read I is/means another?
I find his poet-as-seer epithet very true. The visionary aspect of the poet resides in their ability to abstract from the "real" world, to avoid the contamination of the senses so that they do not perceive what others are made to see and can see the world from what it is, even if that is a very personal vision. That vision is what distinguises poets from the average speaker, reader, or writer.
Always grateful for your reading and comment, @hlezama. When Rimbaud speaks of "changing life," he is obviously referring to life as existence, to put it in a more philosophical word.
The precision you make about Rimbaud's phrase is correct; indeed, the verbal and semantic play is that it "dispersonalizes" the expression: not "I am another," but "I is another". One of the contributions of his vision is precisely to establish that distance between the
"I" empirical and the "I" poetic.
Greetings.