Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur

Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854-1891), poet, and father of French Symbolism.

Rimbaud was born in Charleville and brought up, together with his siblings, by his mother, his army-officer father having abandoned the family home. The boy was restless (in 1870-1871 he ran away from home several times) and clever. His voracious adolescent reading included the works of Illuminists such as Ballanche, who believed in a world of symbols susceptible to interpretation only by the gifted believer, the voyant or seer. Under the influence of such reading, Rimbaud refined his own poetic theory. In letters written in 1871, this precocious adolescent speaks of the poet becoming a visionary through a systematic disorganization of the senses, of reaching beyond the real to things unheard-of and unnameable. The poet, according to Rimbaud, is only an instrument in the expression of the inexpressible: “I am a spectator at the flowering of my thought.” Rimbaud was articulating these ideas before Symbolism became a movement, before the Surrealists celebrated the unconscious, and long before the literary theorists of the 20th century would propose the independence of the work from its creator.

In 1871, Rimbaud sent some poems to Paul Verlaine, who invited him to come to Paris. Bateau Ivre (Drunken Boat), possibly his finest achievement, was written at this time. The crewless, rudderless boat—a symbol of the poet himself—embarks on a breathtaking, hallucinatory journey, expressed in a rapid succession of shifting images. Meaning is subordinated to sensation: the poem dazzles. Verlaine fell for both the poet and the boy (Rimbaud was seventeen), embarking on a relationship that would end, two years later, in violence. After a drunken quarrel, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm, for which he went to prison. During these stormy years, Rimbaud wrote Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), nine fragments of confessional poetry and prose, constituting an examination of his spiritual state. He published this at his own expense, and when it was badly received, destroyed all his own copies.

In 1874 he went to England, where he taught French, and, it is thought, wrote Les Illuminations, which he later gave to Verlaine, who published the text in 1886 in the Symbolist review, La Vogue. Verlaine also published, in his Les Poètes Maudits (The Accursed Poets, 1884), Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles”, in which the particular “colour” of each vowel sound is described in rich, sensuous imagery:

From 1875 Rimbaud wandered, in Europe, Cyprus, Aden, and Abyssinia. He went home to die, of a tumour, in 1891, having written nothing since he left England, 17 years earlier. He received no public acclaim during his lifetime and his output was small, but his influence on poetic practice and theory, right into the 20th century, is widely acknowledged.