Arthur Rimbaud - Robert Robbins Essay

The Significance Of Arthur Rimbaud

By Robert S. Robbins

Arthur Rimbaud, French poet (1854 - 1891). Rimbaud has always been my favorite poet and literary role model because he was the first self-styled visionary that I came across in my reading. My high regard for Rimbaud is based on a deliberate misinterpretation of his significance. I was attracted by the "myth of Rimbaud" because I needed a representative figure of a literary genius based on divine inspiration and not technical merit. William Blake would have served as a better role model, being a poet in possession of the visionary faculty, but my prejudice for modernity kept me from investigating any of the Romantics. The fact that Rimbaud's creative struggles have assumed the proportions of a timeless myth is well documented in René Etiemble's study Le Mythe de Rimbaud and many writers have retold the myth in new works of fiction based on Rimbaud's life story.

Arthur Rimbaud Rimbaud sought to cultivate his soul, to arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, to make himself a visionary. These do not seem like unreasonable goals to me. To "cultivate one's soul" is a fine poetic expression and beautifully expresses the intriguing notion that the soul is something that can be developed. Of course, you can only entertain this notion if you do not find your psyche to be completely opaque to you. It also seems reasonable to arrive at the unknown through a disordering of all the senses. The "known" is only known through the senses. The unknown can be found by exploring the unconscious mind where there is much that is not known to the conscious mind.

I believe every artist should adopt Rimbaud's ideals and seek the illumination of the soul. The poet should look within to find a heightened significance and then manifest that significance in his writing. The inspired poet dreams exceptionally well, experiencing miracles of the imagination, the visions Rimbaud sought and found at times.

Unfortunately, today's writers and poets are too closely associated with academia. The poet has become indistinguishable from the scholar and a new ideal of professionalism demands that poetry be regarded as a craft rather than genius. There is a new emphasis on the craftsmanship of poetry, an emphasis on its superficial aspects, and a disregard for inspiration. The poet-scholar values perspiration over inspiration and will often repeat the old cliché "writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration". Note that the figures may vary but not the disproportion. In Janus-Faced Modernism by Langdon Hammer, the author suggests an interesting sociological shift in the poet's role in society from "the genius" to the "poet-critic". Hart Crane represents the poet as genius, "a romantic poet whose mystical claims to personal vision seem naive and reckless beside the learned skepticism of Eliot". Allen Tate represents the career poet "sustained by reviewing, literary criticism, and the teaching of poetry, including classes in creative writing". The career poet needs to promote the perspiration of writing in order to create the demand for workshops and vast amounts of scholarly analysis. The career poet needs to denigrate inspiration and the very concept of visionary genius because he cannot serve as a guru. It is hard to imagine Rimbaud as a modern poet-scholar.

Arthur Rimbaud Of course, the scholars have embraced Rimbaud to the extent that he provides "difficult material" which requires reams of scholarly analysis to explicate. However, I suspect the scholars are treating Rimbaud like a child. Their work is full of skepticism. Rimbaud's perfectly understandable yearning for the ideal is presented as a fool's quest and he comes across as a miserable failure forced to abandon poetry when it could not transcend itself. The scholar specializes in demystifying the mystifying which robs the poet of his function as the oracle of the sacred.

Much of Rimbaud's work expresses the arrogance of a very powerful imagination, one that feels capable of transcending poetry. I believe that Rimbaud did not so much abandon poetry, when it did not accomplish magic, as he gave it up in disgust with its limitations. A Season In Hell provides many clues to the scope of Rimbaud's inner life. In Night Of Hell he claims "I have all the talents". He also expresses extraordinary confidence in the richness of his inner life, "I'll keep quiet on that: poets and visionaries would be jealous. I'm a thousand times richer than they. Let's be miserly like the sea.". And his statement "I came to find my mind's disorder sacred" is the sort of thing you say when you revere your imagination.

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Underlined titles are not hyperlinks. PB = paperback, HC = hard cover

102. The Poet's Vocation: Selections from the letters of Hölderlin, Rimbaud, and Hart Crane by William Burford and Christopher Middelton Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 62-62940 ©1962 Humanities Research Center, The University Of Texas HC

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