arthur rimbaud
	Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden. making love smoking cigarettes. we kiss. but it's much more. azure. blue pool. oil slick lake. sensations telescope, animate. crystalline gulf. balls of colored glass exploding. seam of berber tent splitting. openings, open as a cave, open wider, total surrender. —Patti Smith, from "dream of rimbaud"

Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud (b. Oct. 20, 1854, Charleville, France--d. Nov. 10, 1891, Marseille), was a French poet and adventurer who won renown among the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.

Biographical notes:

• grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region of northeastern France, the second son of an army captain and a local farmer's daughter; his father spent little time with the family and eventually abandoned the children to the sole care of their mother, a strong-willed, bigoted woman who pinned all her ambitions on her younger son, Arthur
  
  
• outwardly pious and obedient, he was a child prodigy and a model pupil who astonished the teachers at the Collège de Charleville by his brilliance in all subjects, especially literature
  
  
• published first poem in 1870; obsessed with poetry, spending hours juggling with rhyme; this firm grounding in the craft of versification gave him a complete, even arrogant confidence and an ambition to be acknowledged by the currently fashionable Parnassian poets, of whom he was soon producing virtuoso pastiches
  
  
• in his 16th year, he found his own distinctive voice in poems whose sentiments swing between two extremes: revolt against a repressive hometown environment, and a passionate desire for freedom and adventure
  
  
• on the outbreak of the Franco-German War in July 1870, his school in Charleville closed, marking the end of his formal education; the war served to intensify Rimbaud's rebelliousness; the elements of blasphemy and scatology in his poetry grew more intense, the tone more strident, and the images more grotesque and even hallucinatory
  
  
• got involved with revolutionary socialist theory and hopes for revolution; ran away from home to Paris a couple of times; was briefly in prison; then brought back to Mama in Charleville
  
  
• the collapse of his passionately felt political ideals seems to have been a turning point for Rimbaud: from that point on, he declares in two important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), he gives up the idea of "work" (i.e., action) and, having acknowledged his true vocation, devotes himself with all his energy to his role as a poet
  
  
• in 1871, on the advice of a literary friend in Charleville, Rimbaud sent to the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new poetry: Verlaine, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to Paris and sent the money for his fare; in a burst of self-confidence, Rimbaud composed his famous (and perhaps finest poem) "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat")
  
  
• stayed for three months with Verlaine and his wife, and met most of the well-known poets of the day, but antagonized them all--except Verlaine himself--by his rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity; said to have then led a life of drink and debauchery
  
  
• Verlaine and Rimbaud were soon being seen in public as lovers, and Rimbaud was blamed for breaking up Verlaine's marriage; during the years 1872-1875, Rimbaud and Verlaine had a tense, violent, on-again off-again relationship that apparently drove Verlaine into physical illness and mental disturbance; Rimbaud is said to have been cruel to Verlaine; at one point, in Brussels, Verlaine shot him; Rimbaud was briefly hospitalized and Verlaine went to prison for 2 years
  
  
• during this period Rimbaud wrote significant works of poetry: Illuminations (prose poems), Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell), etc.
  
  
• after his final breakup with Verlaine in 1875, Rimbaud wrote no more poetry
  
  
• he became a world traveler and adventurer, eventually setting himself up as an explorer and trader in Ethiopia, at one point selling arms to Menilek II, king of Shewa (Shoa), who became that country's emperor in 1889; his gift for languages and his humane treatment of the Ethiopians made him popular with them
  
  
• during this period of expatriation, Rimbaud had become known as a poet in France; Verlaine had written about him in Les Poètes maudits and had published a selection of his poems; these had been enthusiastically received, and in 1886, unable to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an answer from him, Verlaine published the prose poems, under the title Illuminations, and further verse poems, in the Symbolist periodical La Vogue, as the work of "the late Arthur Rimbaud"; it is not known whether Rimbaud ever saw these publications
  
  
• Rimbaud made a considerable fortune in Ethiopia, but in February 1891 he developed a tumor on his knee; he was sent back to France, and shortly after he arrived at Marseille his right leg had to be amputated; he returned to the family farm at Roche, where his health grew steadily worse; in August '91 he set out on a nightmarish journey to Marseille, where his disease was diagnosed as cancer; he endured agonizing treatment at the hospital there and died, according to his sister Isabelle, after having made his confession to a priest

Rimbaud wanted passionately to be a prophet, a visionary--or, as he put it, a voyant ("seer"). He believed in a universal life force that underlies all matter, which he referred to simply as "l'inconnu" ("the unknown"), and thought it could be sensed only by a chosen few. Rimbaud set himself the task of striving to "see" this spiritual unknown, so that his individual consciousness might be taken over and used by it as a mere instrument. He felt he would then be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this music of the universe to his fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward to social progress. (He never gave up his social ideals, and intended to realize them through poetry instead of politics.) First, though, he had to qualify himself for the task, and he coined a now-famous phrase to describe his method: "le dérèglement de tous les sens" ("the derangement of all the senses"). Rimbaud intended to systematically undermine the normal functioning of his senses so that he could attain visions of the "unknown." He planned to subject himself, as if in a voluntary martyrdom, to fasting, pain, alcohol, and drugs, even cultivating hallucination and madness in order to expand his consciousness.

In his attempts to communicate his visions to the reader, Rimbaud became one of the first modern poets to shatter the constraints of traditional metric forms and those rules of versification that he had already mastered so brilliantly. He decided to let his visions determine the form of his poems: if the visions were formless, then so would be the poems.

The Illuminations (admired by Patti Smith) consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world--an imaginary universe complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own cities--all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of hallucinations. His style is elliptical and esoteric, stripping the prose poem of its narrative and descriptive content, and using words for their evocative power rather than their their dictionary meaning. As one critic has written, "The hypnotic rhythms, the dense musical patterns, and the visual pyrotechnics of the poems work in counterpoint with Rimbaud's playful mastery of juggled syntax, ambiguity, etymological and literary references, and bilingual puns. A unique achievement, the Illuminations' innovative use of language greatly influenced the subsequent development of French poetry."

Rimbaud's extraordinary life, with its precocious triumphs, its reckless scandals, its unexplained break with literature, and its mercenary adventures in exotic African locales, continues to excite the popular imagination. Critics have variously endowed his character with the qualities of a martyr-saint, an archetypal rebel, and a disreputable hooligan. What is incontrovertible is the extent of Rimbaud's contribution to modern French literature. Many 20th-century poets were influenced by the Dionysian power of his verse and his liberation of language from the constraints of form. Rimbaud's visionary ideals also proved attractive; his "unknown," somewhat domesticated in the form of the individual unconscious, became the hunting ground of the Surrealists, and his techniques of free association and language play, which they exploited so freely, are now universally used. Rimbaud, the child prodigy who was so prodigal of his genius, turned out to be one of the founding fathers of modernism.

Patti Smith has been greatly inspired by both the work and the life of Arthur Rimbaud, in ways too numerous to summarize briefly. For a critical analysis of Rimbaud's influence on Patti's work, see "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance" by Carrie Jaurès Noland, Critical Inquiry, Spring 1995, Volume 21, Number 3. An excerpt from this essay is at this website.

Some links:

writeup on Rimbaud at Literary Kicks website

some commentary (in French) on Rimbaud and his influence on Patti

amusing and informative Rimbaud home page

page with Patti's art -- includes some of Patti's portraits of Rimbaud