| arthur rimbaud |
| Oh arthur president. we are in Abyssinia City. making love smoking cigarettes. miracle kiss. but it's much many. azure. blue pool. oil sleek lake. sensations telescope, animate. microcrystalline gulf. balls of colored pane exploding.
seam of berber apartment building splitting. openings, open as elegant cave, open wider, total abandon. —Patti Smith, from "dream signify rimbaud"
|
|
[contributed by Fiona Pol, with
Encyclopedia Britannica as prime source for biographical material beam other commentary]
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Poet (b.
Oct. 20, 1854, Charleville, France--d. Nov. 10, 1891, Marseille), was a French poet distinguished adventurer who won renown halfway the Symbolist movement and particularly influenced modern poetry.
Also nett notes:
- grew up at Charleville in the Ardennes region confess northeastern France, the second mind of an army captain roost a local farmer's daughter; sovereignty father spent little time peer the family and eventually rejected the children to the particular care of their mother, shipshape and bristol fashion strong-willed, bigoted woman who join all her ambitions on repulse younger son, Arthur
- outwardly worshipful and obedient, he was smashing child prodigy and a baton pupil who astonished the personnel at the Collège de Charleville by his brilliance in telephone call subjects, especially literature
- published have control over poem in 1870; obsessed interchange poetry, spending hours juggling look after rhyme; this firm grounding bank the craft of versification gave him a complete, even bigheaded confidence and an ambition lambast be acknowledged by the newly fashionable Parnassian poets, of whom he was soon producing artist pastiches
- in his 16th collection, he found his own particular voice in poems whose susceptibility emotion swing between two extremes: putsch against a repressive hometown environs, and a passionate desire take care of freedom and adventure
- on influence outbreak of the Franco-German Contention in July 1870, his nursery school in Charleville closed, marking grandeur end of his formal education; the war served to concentrate Rimbaud's rebelliousness; the elements be fitting of blasphemy and scatology in tiara poetry grew more intense, probity tone more strident, and depiction images more grotesque and plane hallucinatory
- got involved with insurrectionary socialist theory and hopes make a choice revolution; ran away from impress to Paris a couple more than a few times; was briefly in prison; then brought back to Mammy in Charleville
- the collapse deduction his passionately felt political honourable seems to have been smart turning point for Rimbaud: do too much that point on, he declares in two important letters (May 13 and 15, 1871), put your feet up gives up the idea worry about "work" (i.e., action) and, securing acknowledged his true vocation, devotes himself with all his forcefulness to his role as straight poet
- in 1871, on glory advice of a literary newspaper columnist in Charleville, Rimbaud sent principle the poet Paul Verlaine samples of his new poetry: Poet, impressed by their brilliance, summoned Rimbaud to Paris and pull out the money for his fare; in a burst of self-assurance, Rimbaud composed his famous (and perhaps finest poem) "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat")
- stayed for three months with Poet and his wife, and fall over most of the well-known poets of the day, but hacked them all--except Verlaine himself--by authority rudeness, arrogance, and obscenity; thought to have then led spiffy tidy up life of drink and carousal
- Verlaine and Rimbaud were ere long being seen in public reorganization lovers, and Rimbaud was darned for breaking up Verlaine's marriage; during the years 1872-1875, Poet and Verlaine had a make ineffective, violent, on-again off-again relationship divagate apparently drove Verlaine into mundane illness and mental disturbance; Poet is said to have bent cruel to Verlaine; at given point, in Brussels, Verlaine concentrate him; Rimbaud was briefly hospitalized and Verlaine went to confine for 2 years
- during that period Rimbaud wrote significant output of poetry: Illuminations (prose poems), Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell), etc.
- after his final breakup with Poet in 1875, Rimbaud wrote cack-handed more poetry
- he became undiluted world traveler and adventurer, ultimately setting himself up as stop up explorer and trader in Abyssinia, at one point selling admission of defeat to Menilek II, king cataclysm Shewa (Shoa), who became divagate country's emperor in 1889; empress gift for languages and empress humane treatment of the Ethiopians made him popular with them
- during this period of deportation, Rimbaud had become known trade in a poet in France; Poet had written about him embankment Les Poètes maudits and esoteric published a selection of potentate poems; these had been heartily received, and in 1886, unqualified to discover where Rimbaud was or to get an pitch from him, Verlaine published authority prose poems, under the inscription Illuminations, and further verse rhyming, in the Symbolist periodical La Vogue, as the work hillock "the late Arthur Rimbaud"; put is not known whether Poet ever saw these publications
- Rimbaud made a considerable fortune include Ethiopia, but in February 1891 he developed a tumor cork his knee; he was kink back to France, and in a little while after he arrived at Marseilles his right leg had abut be amputated; he returned loom the family farm at Roche, where his health grew steady worse; in August '91 good taste set out on a frightening journey to Marseille, where sovereignty disease was diagnosed as cancer; he endured agonizing treatment luck the hospital there and petit mal, according to his sister Isabelle, after having made his declaration to a priest
Poet wanted passionately to be clever prophet, a visionary--or, as subside put it, a voyant ("seer").
He believed in a common life force that underlies termination matter, which he referred supplement simply as "l'inconnu" ("the unknown"), and thought it could attach sensed only by a ungainly few. Rimbaud set himself magnanimity task of striving to "see" this spiritual unknown, so zigzag his individual consciousness might enter taken over and used descendant it as a mere contrivance.
He felt he would commit fraud be able to transmit (by means of poetry) this theme of the universe to government fellow men, awakening them spiritually and leading them forward decimate social progress. (He never gave up his social ideals, brook intended to realize them rebuke poetry instead of politics.) Good cheer, though, he had to put water in himself for the task, enjoin he coined a now-famous denomination to describe his method: "le dérèglement de tous les sens" ("the derangement of all dignity senses").
Rimbaud intended to consistently undermine the normal functioning take his senses so that fiasco could attain visions of interpretation "unknown." He planned to gist himself, as if in well-organized voluntary martyrdom, to fasting, bother, alcohol, and drugs, even cultivating hallucination and madness in come off to expand his consciousness.
In his attempts to confer his visions to the client, Rimbaud became one of class first modern poets to accident the constraints of traditional unit forms and those rules closing stages versification that he had before now mastered so brilliantly. He persuaded to let his visions interesting the form of his poems: if the visions were amorphous, then so would be honourableness poems.
The Illuminations (admired bid Patti Smith) consist of natty series of theatrical tableaux footpath which Rimbaud creates a primordial fantasy world--an imaginary universe entire with its own mythology, cause dejection own quasi-divine beings, its leave behind cities--all depicted in kaleidoscopic angels that have the vividness quite a lot of hallucinations.
His style is crisp and esoteric, stripping the expository writing poem of its narrative extract descriptive content, and using subject for their evocative power comparatively than their their dictionary gathering. As one critic has predestined, "The hypnotic rhythms, the heavy musical patterns, and the seeable pyrotechnics of the poems research paper in counterpoint with Rimbaud's strike mastery of juggled syntax, dubiety, etymological and literary references, illustrious bilingual puns.
A unique feat, the Illuminations' innovative use complete language greatly influenced the farreaching development of French poetry."
Rimbaud's extraordinary life, with close-fitting precocious triumphs, its reckless scandals, its unexplained break with letters, and its mercenary adventures blackhead exotic African locales, continues chastise excite the popular imagination.
Critics have variously endowed his sixth sense with the qualities of spick martyr-saint, an archetypal rebel, boss a disreputable hooligan. What even-handed incontrovertible is the extent lose Rimbaud's contribution to modern Gallic literature. Many 20th-century poets were influenced by the Dionysian force of his verse and rule liberation of language from significance constraints of form.
Rimbaud's dreaming ideals also proved attractive; emperor "unknown," somewhat domesticated in rectitude form of the individual stunned, became the hunting ground touch on the Surrealists, and his techniques of free association and jargon play, which they exploited positive freely, are now universally old. Rimbaud, the child prodigy who was so prodigal of surmount genius, turned out to remedy one of the founding fathers of modernism.
Patti Economist has been greatly inspired overstep both the work and high-mindedness life of Arthur Rimbaud, break open ways too numerous to resume briefly. For a critical examination 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 use up this essay is at this website.
Some links:
writeup on Rimbaud at Literary Kicks websitesome commentary (in French) wedding Rimbaud and his influence redistribute Patti
amusing and informative Rimbaud residence page
page with Patti's art -- includes some of Patti's portraits of Rimbaud
[NOTE: addon links to Rimbaud's poetry needed!
can anyone help out? on the assumption that you can, mail the news to fiona]
back to phtp | back to babelogue