RE: ADSactly Poetry: Arthur Rimbaud, The Seer Poet of Modernity (Part I)
The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed—and the great learned one!—among men.—For he arrives at the unknown!
I found that in the wikipedia entry for Rimbaud.
I'm a poet, but I sure would not describe what I do as this kind of torment. I was trying to find out WHY he stopped writing. Was it the end of his relationship to Verlaine? Was it just too much torture to go on? Did he stop using heroin and lose his poetic abilities? Or did he just run out of things to say, perhaps desirous of a less tormented life?
I have never read any of his work I'm afraid, but now I'm interested.
Thanks for writing this.
Grateful for your attention, @owasco. The fragment he quotes belongs to a letter Rimbaud wrote to his friend Paul Demeny in 1871, when he was barely 20 years old. It is the well-known "Letter of the Seer". This text is a key piece in the reflection on modern poetry.
Aspects related to several of the very valid questions it presents will be the subject of future posts.
Rimbaud's work is a decisive milestone in the course of modern poetry; not said by me, but by prominent critics. One of them, Yves Bonnefoy, stated in one of his studies: "To understand Rimbaud, let us read Rimbaud".
Greetings.