How to be a Poet (Rimbaud's Seer Letter)

The first task of a man who would be a poet is know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it.

And he must develop it as soon as he’s come to know it; this seems straightforward: a natural evolution of the mind; so many egoists call themselves authors; still others believe their intellectual growth is entirely self-induced!

[....]

This mean that you have to be a seer, mold oneself into a seer.

The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved and logical derangement of the senses.

Every kind of love, or suffering, or madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only the essence remains.

He undergoes unspeakable tortures that require complete faith and superhuman strength, rending him the ultimate Invalid among men, the master criminal, the first among the damned – and the supreme Savant!

For he arrives at the unknown!

For, unlike everyone else, developed an already rich soul!

He arrives at the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends up losing his understanding of his visions, he has, at least, seen them!

It doesn’t matter if these leaps into the unknown kill him: other awful workers will follow him, they’ll start at the horizons where he has fallen!

French poet Arthur Rimbaud's Seer Letter to Paul Demeny