Arthur Rimbaud, a cursed genius who changed poetry forever

If the category of “genius” referring to the literary field has always been controversial – especially at the time of “the death of the author” promoted by more contemporary criticism -, the American Harold Bloom, very popular with the public, claimed it and saved the “genius writer” for his possession of the transcendent and the extraordinary. Well, admittedly, that seems a radically opposite position to evaluating the text beyond the writer or the writer in biographical terms (and despite the fact that Bloom’s book geniuses sold millions of copies). However, it is possible to affirm that just as witches do not exist, but there are, there are; Knowing the work (and also the life of certain authors) makes it possible to think of geniuses: let there be some, let there be some.

See if it’s not a Arthur Rimbaud, whose only book published in 1873 (this year will be its 150th anniversary) A season in Hell led to ever-evolving poetry (along with the rest of his letters and poems), was a precursor to the surrealists in the 1920s and the beatniks, that movement which grew out of the American counterculture in the turbulent years of the 1960s.

He has been found!

What? – Eternity.

It’s the mixed sun

with the sea

The book was written by Arthur Rimbaud at the age of 19 after the end of her passionate and violent affair with the famous poet Paul Verlaine, one of the outstanding men of Symbolism, with whom he had come to live for two years in London (while Verlaine abandoned his wife and daughter). But we are getting too far ahead of ourselves. Before going back and telling a bit about this stormy relationship, let’s talk about Rimbaud.

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Arthur Rimbaud He was born in 1854 to a military father and a mother from a traditional family in Charleville, in the French countryside. Their father abandoned them and two sisters and never came back, when Rimbaud I was six years old. At school, he stood out for his intelligence. He created poems for school competitions and at the age of 15 he won a Latin poetry competition. He often wrote with his teacher Georges Izambardto whom he announces his plan to settle in Paris in order to be able to unite poetry and life, which is refused to him in his native region (despite the fact that to the great displeasure of his mother, he frequently goes out with a banner with the slogan : “death to god”). In the epistolary published after his death, The seer’s cardsthe passages can be read like this:

“I want to be a poet and I strive to become ‘seeing’: I hardly know how to explain it to you and, even if I did, you wouldn’t understand anything at all. It is about reaching the unknown through the disruption of ‘all the senses’. The suffering that this entails is enormous, but you have to be strong, to be born a poet, and I recognized myself as a poet. It’s not my fault at all. We are wrong to say: ‘I think’; one should say: Someone is thinking of me. sorry for the pun.

“I am another”

Rimbaud he left for Paris as the temperature of political events was rising. He could not then contact the symbolists and was arrested by the Prussian soldiers who were preparing to take the city. It’s a discussion that’s not over, yeah Rimbaud he was in Paris during the Commune, the first workers’ government in all history. What is certain is that he wrote poems supporting the perspective of a workers’ republic. It is also assumed that his poem my tormented heart He claimed to have been raped by the Prussian army when he returned to Charleville.

His plans persisted. Rimbaud began to exchange letters with the poet Paul Verlaineone of the most renowned Symbolists, so much so that Verlaine sent him a train ticket and a brief letter which read: “Come, great soul. You are expected, you are desired.

Verlaine He took her to live in his house with his pregnant wife. He introduced her to Parisian bohemianism and even made her discover Victor-Hugo, who called him “Shakespeare boy”. The relationship between the host poet and the teenager Rimbaud (just turned 17) reached heights of passion, sex and violence, while Rimbaud experimented with hashish and absinthe, an alcoholic drink of immense gradation and which, due to its green color, is nicknamed “the green fairyand was very popular in the bohemian nightlife of Paris.

Meanwhile, the passionate relationship between the poets could not be maintained in the house of Verlaine and in front of his own wife. He decided they should go to London, where they spent two years characterized by raptures of love, violence and then sex, as a method. At the edge of everything Verlaine went to Brussels to his mother, and Rimbaud he followed him. There they repeated their rite. However, this time Verlaine takes a gun and fires twice, hitting Rimbaud in the hand. The symbolist’s mother helps him in the cures while Rimbaud secures the tickets to return to Charleville. Verlaine spent two years in prison for the attack.

Back in the provinces, Rimbaud he commissioned the poems which he later had printed under the title Une saison en enfer. It was only a hundred copies. He sent one to Verlaine. Most of them remained in a barn at home and were only discovered decades later by a scholar of Arthur Rimbaud. At 20, after having published his first book, Rimbaud decided never to write verse again.

He traveled through Europe, then enlisted in the Dutch troops to be sent to the colonies and ended up in Indonesia, then in Java and later in Yemen. There he became a relatively successful arms dealer. The information from those years is fragmentary and is due to the letters that his sister kept. Sick, he returned to France at the age of 37, where his leg was amputated. He had cancer, from which he died.

One of the poems of this only printed book, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year and which would allow the legend of Arthur Rimbaud Until today, it’s called “Tomorrow” and it goes like this:

Didn’t I once have a good, heroic, fabulous youth, enough to write it on gold leaf? Too much luck! For what crime, for what error did I deserve my present weakness? You who claim that animals sob in pain, that the sick despair, that the dead have nightmares, try to tell my dream and my fall. For my part, I cannot explain myself better than the beggar with his continuous Pater and Ave Maria. I can no longer speak!

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