Rimbaud, The Project Works

Jean-Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud

Born : October 20, 1854 - Charleville, France
Died : November 10, 1891 - Marseilles, France

Had he set out deliberately to make his life a source of myth, Arthur Rimbaud could hardly have done better.

Born in the small city of Charleville in northern France to an army officer, and raised by a stern, demanding, possessive mother.

When Arthur was 6 his family was abandoned by their father and forced into poverty. Intrigued by the conditions, the young Rimbaud would sneak out and play with the neighborhood children. His mother, horrified that her children might become coarsened, found the means to move her brood from the worst to the best part of town.

Forbidden to play with other boys, Rimbaud immersed himself in his studies. Stimulated by a yearning for more in life, he became a gifted student.

"You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc..

Rimbaud was until his 15 th year a precocious, well-behaved, religious child, a model student. Encouraged by a local teacher in his attempts to write, he early in 1870 published his first poem, and then in July of that year ran away, heading for Paris, restless and despondent over the loss of his favorite teacher [who'd left to fight in the Franco-Prussian War].

He was arrested for not having a train ticket and was forced to return home, but this episode marked the end of his formal education and the beginning of his short but meteor-like career as a poet.

Within a year he had run away two more times, had changed into a bitter, arrogant, disheveled, foul-talking adolescent, and had written some of the poems that would one day place him among the greatest names of modern poetry.

Broke, Rimbaud lived on the city streets. Immersed in his rebellion, he denounced women and the church. He lived willingly in squalid conditions, studying "immoral" poets [such as Baudelaire] and reading voraciously everything from occult to philosophy.

His job was to jar and jangle the senses. A precursor to surrealism, Rimbaud is also considered to have been one of the creators of the free verse style.

What is so interesting about Rimbaud's poetry is the complete innocence of its nature. He was a sixteen year old coming to terms with the world around him, trying to make sense of things before the world got its cynical, blinding claws on him.

Fueled in part by books on alchemy and occultism from the local library, this strange and solitary boy genius began to conceive of himself as a kind of seer, a saint of poetry, and in two letters, now called the ``Les Lettres du Voyant,'' he worked out his now-famous scheme whereby the artist must cultivate the ``derangement of all the senses.''

In 1871 when he was 16 Rimbaud met the poet Paul Verlaine, who was then ten years his senior and moved into his household. Their friendship was controversial and downright scandalous. Though Verlaine wavered all his life between dark-doings and repentance, Rimbaud was considered at that time to have been Verlaine's undoing.

Rimbaud's drug taking and generally unclean living eventually alienated everyone except Verlaine. In 1872, Verlaine left his wife.

Verlaine and Rimbaud travelled together, lived for a while in London, but the relationship was extremely chaotic and in the summer of 1873, when they were in Belgium, Verlaine in a state of drunken frenzy shot Rimbaud in the hand Rimbaud was tired of their downward spiral and called in the police. Verlaine was sent to prison for 18 months.

Rimbaud went back to the family farm, feeling both guilty and exhilarated, wrote feverishly, completing one of his masterpieces Une Saison en Enfer [A Season in Hell]

"...As for me, I am intact, and I don't care". [from "Bad Blood" A Season in Hell]

Their relationship has been the subject of several books, many songs, a play, and a film. The most notable of these projects is Christopher Hampton's 1960's play about the poets, by the name of Total Eclipse. In 1995, Hampton penned the screenplay, also titled Total Eclipse .

By 1875 when he was 21, Rimbaud was through with literature. Always a traveller and a lover of languages, he began making his way eastward, shipping to Java, working as a quarry foreman in Cyprus, finally settling in East Africa, where he spent the next twelve years as a trader and gun runner. His ambition, as best one can tell from his letters home, was to get rich, but in this he failed.

A leg tumor in 1891 caused him to return to Marseilles in June for medical treatment. His right leg was amputated, and he was nursed for a time by his tender sister Isabelle.

He died on November 10, 1891 aged 37, apparently indifferent to the fame his poetry had by then acquired in Paris.

Few poets have had the lasting impact that Arthur Rimbaud has. Today, over one-hundred years after his death, his mark on modern literature, poetry, music and mindset can still be felt.

He wasn't writing to be published, he wasn't creating to impress the bourgeosie of 19th century France, nor for monetary gain. All that seemed to matter to Arthur Rimbaud was the process of writing, the actual act of putting pen to paper and capturing the images in his young head. Rimbaud was doing this for no one but himself.

In his time, Rimbaud was considered a filthy, cocky child with a small talent and a big mouth. His works weren't appreciated until long after he stopped writing [ somewhere between the age of 19 - 20 ].

Rimbaud published one book -- A Season in Hell -- in his lifetime and it sold six copies. Much later, the rest of the edition was found in a warehouse in Amsterdam.

The only person who kept the flame alive was Verlaine.The vivid irony was that the more he made Rimbaud famous, the more Verlaine became superannuated. In the latter half of Verlaine's life he was proselytizing for this boy who was dead and who only made his own work look old-fashioned and clumsy.

Many of his works were considered obscene; so much so, that after his death, his sister attempted to stop the publishing of many of his more risque works. However, thanks to his one-time partner, poet Paul Verlaine , the majority of his works have remained intact and are available to this day.

But the most important thing Rimbaud left behind was his poetry and his spirit. My hope is to extend that spirit and that view to anyone willing to take a look at his work.

Rimbaud sought to cultivate his soul, to arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, to make himself a visionary.

I believe every artist should seek the illumination of the soul. We must look within ourselves to find a heightened significance and then bring that significance to our art.

Profound aesthetic experiences should come naturally to the true artist. The true artist dreams exceptionally well. It is sufficient to walk the city's streets at night to find inspiration. The monumental architecture of the skyline with its galaxy of lights is enough to inspire miracles of the imagination, the visions Rimbaud sought and found at times.

Unfortunately, it is more common for today's writers and artists to value perspiration over inspiration.

Although there is a great deal of interest in understanding creativity, inspiration is still given little consideration as part of the creative process. I am very easily inspired. It is not something I have to work at or actively seek. In fact, I am frequently inspired but let the moment pass.

And it is unnecessary to disorder all the senses to arrive at the unknown. The unknown will be found when you lose your familiarity with the world. It all becomes a mystifying spectacle if you can rid yourself of the familiar.

They reject the avant-garde because it does not present them with the familiar. But if you can appreciate being mystified, the avant-garde can be a pure aesthetic experience.

It is quite possible to cultivate one's soul in private. You can enrich your life with cultural activities, but refuse to participate in those activities. Your imagination can be engaged by creative works without giving a visible response. You can take what our culture has to offer and give nothing back. When there is no dialog between the artist and his culture, only the visionary has the privilege of seeing his visions.

But he is an inspired individual and cannot be impoverished by society's neglect.

The Symbolist Movement advocated just such an attitude, "art for art's sake", aspiring to pure aestheticism with no concern for social utility.

Arthur Rimbaud was a young genius who changed the language of modern poetry and he sang a siren song across the years.

Rimbaud's literary style has influenced almost all modern forms of literature, including the Beats. He has been cited as an inspiration by songwriters like Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan. Patti Smith has often referred to him in her poetry and songs.

Like Rimbaud and Verlaine, many people in the beat generation of the late 1950s also wanted to explore everything. Dangerous relationships, social provocation, drinking and drugs, to try everything and find out the real truth about life.They didn't, of course. Nobody has the truth, but, perhaps, they opened some doors for us.

"You don't have to do the same things they did, but watching them, you can ask questions about the borders of human experience and reality."

Playwright Christopher Hampton adds: "There's a direct line that goes from Rimbaud to Jules Lafourge (the Symbolist poet) to T.S. Eliot. The whole of the modern movement was initiated by Rimbaud".

Rimbaud has influenced many : Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac. Van Morrison wrote "Tore Down a la Rimbaud." Patti Smith sang "Rimbaud Dead".

There are the many countless who have connected with Rimbauds' work, and understood what it means to be awake and free and trying to be.