I may not get all the connections, but happiness, dancing, laughter, love: what is there not to like? And maybe to gain a happiness we should ignore conventional moral strictures: what ever punishment there may be, happiness overwhelms. I will never be able to throw Love out of the window. When we are very strong, who draws back? Or very happy, who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad, what can they do to us?ĭress up, dance, laugh. It is hard to know what he means, but then, well, consider these lines from Illuminations: Action is not life, but a way of spoiling some force, an enervation.

I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness.

What is my void, compared with the stupefaction awaiting you?” Many lines can be strange and yet stupendous, as this passage from that book: “I became a fabulous opera. These are filled with gnomic sayings, as is the case with these lines from A Season in Hell: “My wisdom is as neglected as chaos is. Rimbaud would write several great masterpieces which are fragmented and almost incomprehensible: A Season in Hell and Illuminations. (It did not end well: Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist, and thereafter Verlaine was sentenced for deviance and spent two years in prison.) Rimbaud drank to excess, loved the supposedly hallucinogenic alcohol absinthe, and smoked large quantities of hashish. Shortly after, he began a close liaison with another great French poet, Paul Verlaine: tempestuous, passionate, and of course homosexual. Even Mozart, who started composing music when he was five, lived and composed until he was 35.Īt the start of the four years when he was prolific, Rimbaud was a student in what we might call a high school. But to start at 16 and end at 19? Unheard of. Sylvia Plath was 30 when she died, and Percy Bysshe Shelley was 30 as well. That represents a problem for adult readers: who wants to recognize that the words of a sixteen year-old might have the deepest of resonances with us? Shouldn’t life experience and maturity have something to do with poetry? Yes, yes, I know that John Keats died at 26, and Wilfred Owen at 25. I never taught Rimbaud, although I would mention him in class: “If you want to feel inadequate, students, he is something for you: the great poet Rimbaud was done writing poems by the time he was your age.” Hmmmm. He ultimately became a trader in coffee (and ivory, and guns) in what is now the Sudan, and died early of cancer at the age of thirty-seven. He wrote almost all his poems between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. No one in the history of poetry has done what he did. Here’s where we want to start with Rimbaud. And several of his early poems, which I will discuss in this letter, are absolutely wonderful. And yet there is something about him that is immensely important. He is, as I have often thought, close to incomprehensible to me. I did not like the poem then, and I do not particularly like it now.īut recently I had occasion to re-read the poem (which is how I know I do not like it now) and, fortunately, I decided to keep reading Rimbaud. When I was in college, I read a poem about vowels – how each had a color – by Arthur Rimbaud. There are two red holes in his right side. He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast,

Smiling asĪ sick child would smile, he is taking a nap: Pale on his green bed where the light rains down.

Sleeps he is stretched out on the grass, under clouds, It is a small valley which bubbles over with rays.Ī young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,Īnd the nape of his neck bathing in the cool blue watercress, Silver rags where the sun shines from the proud mountain:

Illuminations rimbaud