Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud: Five Years, Then Silence

He wrote everything that matters between roughly sixteen and twenty. Then he stopped, walked away from literature entirely, and spent the second half of his short life in Aden and Harar selling coffee and guns, writing letters home about money and dysentery. When Paul Verlaine published *Les Poètes maudits* in 1884 and made him famous in Paris, Rimbaud was in the Horn of Africa and appears not to have cared. He had already invented modern poetry and lost interest in it.

Charleville

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the French Ardennes. His father, Frédéric, was an army captain who lived in the family home for a total of three months, from February to May 1853, and after the birth of the youngest child Isabelle in 1860 stopped coming home on leave at all. There was never a divorce. His mother, Marie Catherine Vitalie Rimbaud, née Cuif, simply began calling herself the widow Rimbaud — a rigid, devout, unforgiving woman raising four children in a provincial town.

He was a spectacular schoolboy, collecting Latin prizes. In January 1870 a twenty-two-year-old rhetoric teacher, Georges Izambard, arrived at the Collège de Charleville and told the fifteen-year-old to write original verse instead of imitations. Rimbaud regarded him as a kind of elder brother, and it is the last conventional relationship in the story. Within months the Franco-Prussian War had disrupted school entirely and he had begun running away to Paris.

The Seer Letters

In May 1871, at sixteen, Rimbaud wrote two letters — one to Izambard, one to the poet Paul Demeny — that function as the founding documents of modern French poetry. The programme they set out is brutally simple and completely serious. "The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses." The point of the derangement is not sensation for its own sake; it is method. "The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses."

What was radical was the *rational* in that sentence. Rimbaud was not proposing romantic intoxication but a systematic programme of self-alteration undertaken to make the poet an instrument capable of registering what ordinary consciousness filters out. He wanted, in his own account, to find a language and to revolutionise the genre. He was a teenager writing a research proposal.

Verlaine

He sent poems, including "Le Bateau ivre," to Paul Verlaine, then a married and established poet ten years his senior. Verlaine invited him to Paris. What followed between 1871 and 1873 scandalised the literary city: an affair conducted in public, drunken, deliberately abrasive, moving between Paris, Brussels and London while Verlaine's marriage collapsed.

It ended on 10 July 1873 in Brussels, when Verlaine in a drunken rage fired two shots and wounded the eighteen-year-old Rimbaud in the left wrist. On 8 August, with the charge reduced to wounding with a firearm, Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison.

A Season in Hell

In October 1873 Rimbaud published, at his own expense, a small booklet in Brussels: *Une Saison en Enfer*. It is a prose-poem sequence of spiritual crisis — an interrogation of his own visionary project, of Christianity, of Europe, of himself — and it contains the sentence that has been quoted ever since: *Il faut être absolument moderne*. We must be utterly modern.

It reads like a farewell to literature, and largely was, though *Illuminations* — forty-two prose poems written between about 1872 and 1875 — followed him out. Those are the technically extraordinary ones: bizarre vocabulary, unconventional punctuation, mysterious proper nouns, riddling endings, a text that treats the sentence itself as a plastic material. They were not published until 1886, by which time their author had been out of poetry for a decade.

Africa

By around twenty he had stopped writing. He travelled — Java, Cyprus, and then, in 1880, Aden, where he became a principal employee of the Bardey trading agency. He went on to manage its agency in Harar, in what is now Ethiopia, and became the first European to oversee the export of Harar's celebrated coffee. He also traded firearms. He learned the languages, befriended the governor of Harar, whose son would become the emperor Haile Selassie, and in 1884 the Société de Géographie in Paris published his *Report on the Ogaden* — the same man, now writing careful geographical prose about terrain and trade routes.

In February 1891, in Aden, he developed what he took for arthritis in his right knee. It was not. He sailed for France on 7 May aboard *L'Amazone*, was admitted to the Hôpital de la Conception in Marseille, and on 27 May his right leg was amputated. The post-operative diagnosis was bone cancer, probably osteosarcoma. He died in Marseille on 10 November 1891, aged thirty-seven, attended by his sister Isabelle.

Why Arthur Is Called a Genius

The claim for Rimbaud is unusual in that it can be dated. Between 1870 and 1875 — roughly ages sixteen to twenty — a provincial schoolboy with no literary connections rebuilt French poetry's assumptions from the ground: he abolished the distinction between poetic and non-poetic language, refusing to accept that some words were admissible in verse and others were not; he pushed the prose poem into a fully independent form; he proposed in the seer letters a theory of poetry as a technology for reaching the unknown rather than a decorative art. In "Voyelles" he assigned colours to vowels, treating language as a substance that could be taken apart and re-made. The Poetry Foundation's assessment credits him with a positive embrace of chaos, a state in which language disintegrates and reconstitutes itself — precisely the operation modernism would spend the following fifty years performing.

The influence is measurable rather than asserted. Verlaine's *Les Poètes maudits* built his reputation in 1884; the Symbolists claimed him; the Surrealists took the seer letters as scripture; Samuel Beckett and John Ashbery translated him. Few writers of any age have been so consequential in so short a working life.

The counter-case is worth stating honestly. The output is small and uneven — the early *Poésies* are technically orthodox and often adolescent in their anti-bourgeois posturing, and *Illuminations* contains passages that resist reading not because they are deep but because they may not be finished. His mythology has done heavy lifting for his reputation: the beautiful teenage rebel, the shooting, the exile, the gun-running, an unmatchable biography that makes cool appraisal difficult. And he himself abandoned the entire enterprise, which is either the final proof of his seriousness or evidence that he did not believe in it. Both readings are defensible. What is not disputable is that a boy under twenty-one changed what a poem could be.

Legacy

Rimbaud never saw his own influence. *Illuminations* appeared in 1886 while he was inventorying coffee in Harar; the poets who canonised him were reading a man they assumed was dead or lost. Everything that followed — Symbolism, Surrealism, the prose poem as a serious form, the twentieth-century conviction that language should be broken to make it tell the truth — passes through those five years between the Ardennes and London. The most influential French poet of the nineteenth century spent his thirties as a colonial trader and died at thirty-seven believing, as far as anyone can tell, that the poetry had been a phase.

Achievements

• Wrote 'Le Bateau ivre' at the age of sixteen
• Authored 'Une Saison en Enfer' (A Season in Hell), 1873
• Pioneered free verse and the modern prose poem in 'Illuminations'
• Profoundly influenced Symbolism, Surrealism, and modern poetry