Selected Poems and Letters

ARTHUR RIMBAUD was born in Charleville in 1854. From an early age he wrote poems and stories, and excelled at Latin verse. In adolescence he developed a hatred for provincial life, fleeing to Paris in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, and again in 1871 at the time of the Commune. His poetry was a rigorous search for ‘the unknown’ – based on a ‘reasoned disordering of all the senses’ by means of alcohol and drugs. His relationship with Paul Verlaine led him to London, where the couple drank away their modest resources and Rimbaud reinvented the city in his prose-poems, the Illuminations (1886), which with A Season in Hell (1873) are regarded as his highest achievements, but the poems in verse, which include ‘Le Bateau ivre’, are among the most famous in nineteenth-century European literature. At the age of twenty, Rimbaud was done with poetry. He embarked on a new life, signing up as a mercenary in the Dutch East Indies, a clerk in a travelling circus and then as a quarry foreman in Cyprus. In 1880 he set up as a trader in what is now Ethiopia. He spent the remainder of his life as a dealer in coffee, hides, weapons and ivory. He was an able explorer and linguist, and a prolific letter writer. He died in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven.

JEREMY HARDING is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and the translator of Modern French Philosophy by Vincent Descombes. He is the author of Small Wars, Small Mercies, an account of the liberation struggles in Africa, where he worked as a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, and The Uninvited, which tracks the movement of refugees and clandestine migrants into Western Europe since the end of the Cold War.

JOHN STURROCK was educated at the universities of Oxford and Sussex. He was Deputy Editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1972 to 1984 and is now Consulting Editor of the London Review of Books. He has published critical books on the French New Novel, Borges, autobiography and Structuralism, and translated Victor Hugo, Stendhal and Marcel Proust for Penguin Classics.

Translated and with an Introduction and Notes by
JEREMY HARDING and JOHN STURROCK

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Acknowledgements

Jeremy Harding wishes to thank James Ozanne, Tim Curtis and Martin Thom for pointing the way to Rimbaud; Robert de Does, André Guyaux, Michel Murat and Lorna Scott Fox for their invaluable advice on some of the difficulties in the text; and Patrick and Geneviève Réal for their generous support. John Sturrock is grateful to André Guyaux for help on a number of points in the correspondence, and to Dr Richard Pankhurst, doyen of British Ethiopianists, who was able to explain numerous otherwise obscure references to local names, Amharic terms and events in Abyssinia in the 1880s.

A Note on the Translation

Translators of poetry owe a lot to their predecessors. Oliver Bernard brought Rimbaud to a wide English readership with his Penguin edition of 1962, which this one supersedes. There are a number of differences. It is now widely accepted that A Season in Hell predates many of the Illuminations, and so in this edition, A Season in Hell no longer appears at the end. I have also included The Deserts of Love, which was not in Bernard's volume. There have been other, lesser changes in ordering, and some of the poems have been retitled, or titled, in line with recent textual scholarship.

The parallel text has been adopted in preference to the prose translation at the foot of the page – a choice that could be said to cramp a translator's style rather more than a prose version does. But I am convinced it is more manageable for the reader. It's easier, after all, to run one's eye from version to original when the lines are juxtaposed in the verse, or more or less level in the prose-poems, than it is to move from a chunk of prose to a piece of verse, or to another piece of prose in a different type size.

This, in turn, makes it easier for readers to spot where a liberty has been taken in translation. To leave off a question mark in the French (as I've done with the last line of ‘Memory’) because something more desolate than a question seems to get the truth of the poem in English, and catch the right inflection, is to take a liberty. To update Rimbaud's idiomatic mode – assuredly not his only mode – by converting to current usage (as I've done with ‘Knowing Way’) is to take a greater liberty still. Often a loyal translation is nearer the mark than a faithful one. Not all readers will agree, but the parallel text format will help them to make their own judgements.

These translations do not attempt to track the syllable count of the French. Instead I've tried to work with rhythms that sound well on an English ear. Rhyme is also avoided, except in a handful of cases where it has insinuated itself into a version and gone on, through a number of drafts, to make itself at home. Here and there, an obscurity in the original has seemed to need an intrusion in the English. In a few of the explanatory notes, too, I've erred on the side of generosity. ‘To the Poet on the Matter of Flowers’, for example, requires rather more of translators and editors than an august silence.

The decision to select from Rimbaud's literary work was taken in order to make room for a good many of the letters he wrote after he had finished with poetry. But selecting cannot be done without a lot of head-shaking and hair-tearing. A Season in Hell stands entire – the only straightforward decision. Despite a dozen or more regrets, I'd like to think that this is a representative sample of the poetry.

The job of translating is made much easier by the existence of good editions in the original. The source for John Sturrock's translations is Antoine Adam's Pléiade edition of 1972, which remains authoritative with regard to the letters. The poems selected here were translated while André Guyaux was preparing a new edition of the Pléiade, and so the principal source for the poetry has been the Gamier Œeuvres edited by Suzanne Bernard and André Guyaux. In the notes, I have drawn extensively on Bernard and Guyaux, and on the three-volume Œeuvres edited by Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Flammarion), as well as volume I of the Œeuvres complètes edited by Steve Murphy (Champion). I have used ideas from Guyaux's Poétique du fragment (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1985) and L'Art de Rimbaud by Michel Murat (Paris: José Corti, 2002) in the Introduction and the notes, while the Chronology borrows liberally from Steinmetz.

I have used underlinings to indicate words and phrases which were written by Rimbaud in English. In the case of the letters written in East Africa, I have, as far as possible, spelt place-names, titles and proper names etc. in the form used by Dr Richard Pankhurst in his book The Ethiopians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Rimbaud's own spellings are often inconsistent, but I have standardized them; it seemed unnecessarily pedantic to imitate his understandably wayward practice.

Chronology

1854 Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud born, 20 October, to Vitalie Cuif and Captain Frédéric Rimbaud in Charleville, a town in the Ardennes near the border with Belgium.

1865 Rimbaud starts to attend the Collège, or secondary school, at Charleville.

1869 Wins regional prize for Latin verse; writes ‘The Orphans' New Year Gifts’.

1870 Georges Izambard takes a teaching post at the Collège. ‘The Orphans’ published in La Revue pour tous. Rimbaud sends work to the poet Théodore de Banville. France declares war on Prussia (19 July); Rimbaud leaves for Paris (end of August). During his detention at the Mazas prison (31 August-5 September), Napoleon III is defeated at the Battle of Sedan and surrenders to the Prussian Army; the Third Republic replaces the Second Empire on 4 September, and a Government of National Defence is formed to prosecute the war. On his release from prison, Rimbaud stays with Izambard's ‘aunts’ in Douai, where he begins copying his verses into a notebook for the poet Paul Demeny. While Rimbaud is in Douai, the Prussians lay siege to Paris (19 September). He is sent home to Charleville, leaves again, travels through Belgium and comes back to Douai. Finishes the notebook and presents it to Demeny. Goes back to Charleville.

1871 Mézières, next to Charleville, falls to the Prussians (2 January). France signs an armistice with Prussia (28 January) and the Siege of Paris ends. A new National Assembly is elected (February) with Adolphe Thiers as President, to negotiate the peace. Rimbaud spends two weeks in Paris and returns on foot to Charleville (10 March). Paris defies the Government in Versailles by proclaiming a revolutionary Commune (18 March) and electing its own representatives (18 March). Rimbaud is most probably in Paris some time in April, briefly, or early May. According to his friend Ernest Delahaye, he joins an irregular Communard unit in the defence of Paris against Government troops. In Charleville, he writes the ‘Seer Letter’ to Demeny (15 May). The Commune is crushed in the ‘Bloody Week’ of 21–28 May. Still in Charleville (late September), Rimbaud writes ‘Drunken Boat’ and heads for Paris at the invitation of Paul Verlaine. Consorts with Verlaine and his acquaintances. Attends a dinner with the ‘Vilains Bonshommes’ – mostly Parnassians – and recites ‘Drunken Boat’. Frequents the more radical circle known as the Zutistes.

1872 Leaves Paris (January) at the instigation of Verlaine, whose family life is in ruins, largely as a result of what is now a love-affair with Rimbaud. Heads for Charleville via Arras, in the north-east. A period of reading and writing (perhaps some early prose-poems). Returns to Paris (early May). Leaves with Verlaine for Brussels (July), where they stay, despite the efforts of Verlaine's wife and mother-in-law, for three months. They travel to London (September) and, on a recommendation from Eugène Vermesch, a journalist and Communard refugee, find lodgings at 34 Howland Street. In London they meet many former Communards. They fall into penury. At the instigation of his mother, Rimbaud returns to Charleville (December).

1873 Rejoins Verlaine in London (January). They work on their English, with a view to teaching; they frequent the British Library Reading Room. Rimbaud goes back to the family farm at Roche, outside Charleville (April). Speaks of his projected ‘Pagan Book’ or ‘Negro Book’ (A Season in Hell) to Delahaye (May); returns to London with Verlaine (May). They lodge at 8 Great College Street, Camden Town. They are ostracized by Communard refugee acquaintances because of their dissolute ways and their homosexuality. Verlaine leaves with a plan to appease his wife (July) and, from Brussels, broadcasts his impending suicide. Rimbaud arrives in Brussels (8 July) and, on announcing his departure two days later (10 July), is shot through the wrist by Verlaine. Returns to Roche. Verlaine is imprisoned; A Season in Hell is finished (August). The book is printed in Brussels (October): Rimbaud's mother puts up the advance to the printer; Rimbaud collects his author's copies; the rest remain undistributed. In Paris (November), Rimbaud meets the young poet Germain Nouveau. Winter in Charleville.

1874 Back to Paris (March); from there to London with Nouveau. They lodge at 178 Stamford Street, near Waterloo Station. Starts to copy out some of the Illuminations. Nouveau goes back to France (April). Rimbaud moves to rooms near Soho. His mother and sister come to London (July). He begins teaching in Reading. Returns to Charleville for the new year.

1875 Verlaine is released from prison (January). Rimbaud goes to Stuttgart (February), to learn German and prepare for a career in business or industry. Verlaine travels to Stuttgart (March), where Rimbaud gives him the manuscript of the Illuminations, which will not resurface for eleven years. Travels to Milan (May). Suffers sunstroke while walking through Liguria (June); repatriated to Marseille; announces intention to join Carlist troops in Spain. Travels to Paris (July); tutors in a private school; returns to Charleville (October). Writes his last known piece of verse (‘Dream’) in a letter to Delahaye.

1876 Leaves for Vienna (April), is robbed and returns to Charleville. To Brussels, then Rotterdam (May) to enlist in the Dutch Colonial Army. Takes ship for the East Indies (June); arrives (July); deserts in Java (early August); finds passage to Ireland (early December); and arrives in Charleville a few days later.

1877 Rest of the winter in Charleville or Roche. To Germany (May), first in Cologne, perhaps recruiting mercenaries, then Bremen, where he tries and fails to enlist in the US Navy, then Hamburg. Joins the Cirque Loisset, a French travelling circus, possibly as a cashier, and travels with them to Stockholm (July), then Copenhagen. Returns to Charleville. To Marseille (September or October), walking for long stretches; embarks for Alexandria, falls ill and is put off the boat at Civitavecchia; returns to Charleville.

1878 Somewhere in Germany or Switzerland until late spring. Summer in Roche. On foot (October) through the Vosges and over the Alps by the Saint-Gothard pass. Sets sail from Genoa for Alexandria (November), where he signs up for a job in Cyprus as a quarry foreman (December).

1879 Tension with the workforce. Returns to France (May), to recover from typhoid. Summer in Roche. Tries to return to Alexandria in the autumn but, hit by fever in Marseille, returns to Roche for the winter.

1880 Arrives in Cyprus (March) and takes a new job, quits and takes another. Leaves for Aden via Alexandria (July). Later rumours suggest he was forced to leave Cyprus, after causing the death of a labourer on a works site by hitting him with a stone. Begins working for Alfred Bardey's import-export business in Aden and is sent to consolidate a branch of the business in Harar, a town under Egyptian control since 1875, lying at the western edge of the Ogaden. He arrives in December.

1881 Revolt, led by the Mahdi, against Anglo-Egyptian presence in nearby Sudan. Bardey and colleagues visit Rimbaud in Harar (April). Health problems. Rimbaud mounts expedition to Bubassa (May). Returns to Aden, where he continues working for Bardey.

1883 Sets out for Harar (March) and works, again, as Bardey's agent. Starts taking photographs. Organizes trading expeditions in the Ogaden. Completes a report on the Ogaden for the company, which Bardey sends on to the Société de Géographie in Paris. Verlaine publishes his study of Rimbaud in Lutèce (October, November), quoting generously from hitherto unpublished poems. The Mahdi inflicts major defeat on Hicks Pasha in Sudan (5 November).

1884 The report on the Ogaden is read out at the Société de Géographie (February). Mahdist revolt intensifies; Britain, now fully in charge of Egypt's affairs, resolves on an Egyptian withdrawal from the Red Sea coast and hinterlands, including Harar. Bardey closes the branch and Rimbaud decamps to Aden (April). Egypt evacuates Harar (September).

1885 Fall of Khartoum and death of General Gordon (January). Egyptian evacuation of Messawa: the Italians move in, consolidating their presence in the region (February). Rimbaud decides to leave Bardey's company. Signs contract for an arms-trading venture with Pierre Labatut, a dealer in Shewa (October). Rimbaud is to run a caravan of guns from the coast, near Djibouti, up into Abyssinia and deliver them to King Menilek of Shewa, who is arming for a confrontation with his Tigrean neighbour, Yohannes IV, Emperor of Abyssinia. Rimbaud crosses from Aden and prepares the caravan (November/December).

1886 Rimbaud is stuck on the coast for several months: the French authorities forbid the traffic of arms to Shewa; he obtains a special authorization, but Labatut falls ill (c. June) and later dies. Rimbaud hopes to proceed with another partner, Paul Soleillet, but he too dies (September). Rimbaud resolves to run arms up to Shewa on his own (October). In France, meanwhile, La Vogue publishes a sequence of Illuminations and some verse-poems (May, June).

1887 King Menilek captures the evacuated town of Harar (January) while Rimbaud is still en route from the coast to Shewa. Rimbaud arrives in the Shewan town of Ankober (February), only to discover that he must go on to Entotto, if he is to negotiate with Menilek. The King and his entourage force him to drop his price for the weapons, and invoke Labatut's debts – real and alleged – to lower it still further. Rimbaud leaves Shewa with the explorer Jules Borelli (May) and heads for Harar, where he will have to convert Menilek's promissory note into cash through the good offices of the King's new governor in Harar, his cousin Ras Mekonnen. Travels to Aden (July) and Cairo (August). Publishes a long article about his journey to Shewa in Le Bosphore égyptien; fails to secure backing from the Société de Géographie for an expeditionary project. Back to Aden (October).

1888 To Harar some time in the early part of the year; back to Aden and again to Harar (May), to trade on his own account and as a ‘commission agent’ for César Tian, another import-export entrepreneur in Aden.

1889 Rimbaud in Harar. Yohannes IV killed by Mahdists (March). Menilek becomes Emperor of Abyssinia.

1891 Complains of pain in the right leg. Almost immobilized (March). Is carried down from Harar across the desert to Zeillah, a twelve-day journey (April). To Aden and then Marseille (May), where the leg is amputated. Leaves hospital in Marseille for Roche (July). Returns to Marseille as general paralysis sets in (August). Dies on 10 November at the age of thirty-seven.

Introduction

Arthur Rimbaud's demons allowed him very little rest. His life as a productive poet lasted five years and transformed him from a brilliant schoolboy with a gift for Latin verse into a major European poet. His first published poem in French, a deft piece of pilfering from the models of the day, was written in 1869, around the time of his sixteenth birthday. The last of his prose-poems, which recast the rules of composition as if from scratch, were probably written in 1874 or 1875. Between the beginning and the end of this brief career, there were several evolutions. In 1871, Rimbaud announced a ‘visionary’ poetics based on what he called a ‘disordering of all the senses’. The results were spectacular. By the following year, he had stretched the rules of French prosody to breaking-point to produce the childlike lyric cadences of the Last Poems. Then, in 1873, he published A Season in Hell, a repudiation both of his life as a poet and of his project: to change the nature of poetry, as well as the world, by reinventing language itself. ‘Now,’ he wrote, ‘I must bury my imagination and my memories.’ He continued working on the prose-poems even so. In the end, however, A Season in Hell was as good as its word. At the age of twenty, Rimbaud had dealt with his unfinished business and abandoned literature for ever.

He has become a legendary figure on three counts: his extraordinary poetic achievement, the turbulence of his five years or so as a practising poet, and the rupture with poetry, followed by a new life as a colonial trader, in which he encountered some of the harshest conditions that Europeans had experienced in Africa. It is a legend of transformation and re-emergence, shadowed by fitful continuities between the errant poet and the errant trader. Legends often turn out to be shaky on close inspection, yet this one can be re-examined and demystified without losing its status, which has survived the debunking of many half-truths and lies about Rimbaud. Accordingly, the new Penguin Rimbaud aims to carry the reader beyond the period of A Season in Hell and the Illuminations, to the years in Africa. A generous selection of Rimbaud's work – around two-thirds of it – is presented here in French, with a parallel text translation. It is followed by more than a hundred of his letters, many of them written from Africa.

Poems, 1869–71

Rimbaud was born in the Ardennes, in the town of Charleville, not far from the Belgian border, on 20 October 1854. His father, Frédéric, was a Captain of Infantry in the French Army, who abandoned the family in 1860. His mother, Vitalie Cuif, was the daughter of well-to-do peasants with a farm near Charleville. She was a disciplinarian – a tendency reinforced by her husband's desertion – and a devout Catholic; Rimbaud's aggressive dislike of the Church and all its works is very much on display in the early poems. As a boy, he suffered both from his mother's pronounced sense of duty to her children and from the inertia of small-town provincial life. According to Enid Starkie (Arthur Rimbaud, 1938), Mme Rimbaud would punish her son and his brother Frédéric by making them memorize lines of Latin. ‘Why learn Latin?’ Rimbaud complained in a confident piece of prose, written when he was nine. ‘No one speaks that language.’ Yet in the regional examinations of 1869, his Latin verse submission earned him first prize – one of more than a dozen ‘firsts’ he racked up in two consecutive years.

A young teacher who arrived at the Collège in Charleville the following year was asked to keep an eye on its greatest asset. Georges Izambard, a liberal republican with radical tendencies, deeply at odds with the complacency of the Second Empire, gave Rimbaud the run of his library and was soon in trouble, with the boy's mother. ‘I am extremely grateful to you for all that you are doing for Arthur,’ she wrote to him in 1870. ‘… But there is one thing I cannot approve of and that is, for instance, the reading of the book you lent him the other day (Les Misérables, V. Hugot [sic]).’ It was probably too late for parental censorship to make a difference, even if it had been enforceable. Beyond the dazzling achievements at school and the difficult scenes at home, a course of action was becoming clear to the young Rimbaud.

A few weeks later he sent three poems off to Théodore de Banville, a leading light of the Parnassian school. The Parnassians – the dominant poetic movement of the day – were a loosely defined group, whose first series of anthologies, Le Parnasse contemporain (‘The Modern Parnassus’) of 1866, were familiar to Rimbaud. By the 1870s the movement had become a major way-station between post-1830 Romanticism and Symbolism, which would not gain definition for another fifteen years or more. The work of the Parnassians was anti-inspirational. The movement's figurehead, Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle, was a brilliant technician, whose followers came to see poetry as a highly methodical process, based on formal constraints which they welcomed. The political and social value of art – an outmoded Romantic idea – was rejected: the ideal was a burnished surface, depersonalized, detached and visibly skilful.

Banville was by all accounts a more approachable figure than Leconte de Lisle, but he did not help Rimbaud get his poems published. Rimbaud's ambition was undiminished. A penniless journey by train to Paris in August 1870, shortly after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, gave notice of his intentions: whatever else poetry might be, it meant getting out of Charleville. With this founding escapade, he solemnized the bond between his calling as a poet and his urge to be on the move.

Having failed to pay his fare, Rimbaud was briefly imprisoned in Paris. Izambard negotiated his release in early September. He was brought to stay with a trio of sisters in Douai whom Izambard referred to as his adoptive ‘aunts’. He returned to Charleville, only to take flight again, heading over the border to Belgium, in the vain hope of finding an opening in journalism, and made his way back to Douai. By the time he left for Charleville, he had set out his stall: a fair copy of works to date, about twenty poems altogether. He entered them in a notebook and presented it to Paul Demeny, a teacher and poet, whom he'd met through Izambard. The contents of the ‘Douai notebook’ include a range of light-fingered prisings (from Victor Hugo and Baudelaire, among others), recyclings (Villon, via Banville) and satirical reworkings (Albert Glatigny), but there are also beautiful passages where the boy-impresario is auditioning the boy-poet, out of earshot of any obvious masters. Parts of ‘Nina Gets Back to Him’ and ‘Popular Fiction’ strike this vein. So do the two superb sonnet-sketches, ‘At the Green Inn’ and ‘Knowing Way’, which play with elements from Rimbaud's hike in Belgium. In both poems, a tricky adolescent with a good ear for vernacular and a real skill with the standard twelve-syllable line, or alexandrine, is trying out the breezy tone of the man's man – food, beer, fancying the waitress – to see how it suits him. It's the imperfect fit that works so well. The youth whose clothes are a size too big is not a comic figure, but a little emperor, with all the trappings of mastery billowing around him. His empire is language.

At the beginning of November, Izambard again delivered Rimbaud back to his mother. By now the Emperor proper, Napoleon III, had capitulated to the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan and France was struggling on under a Government of National Defence. The Second Empire had ceased to exist, and a Third Republic had been declared. Paris was under siege. It held out until January 1871, when an armistice was signed. Rimbaud, meanwhile, was confined to Charleville. He had already conceived a loathing for Napoleon III and was now honing a ferocious republican politics. As Bismarck bullied the new Government into a humiliating peace, Rimbaud spent his days in the Charleville library. ‘Seat-People’ is his revenge on the librarian for his reluctance to supply the books Rimbaud requested (‘occult’ and ‘subversive’ works, according to Enid Starkie).

In February he headed off again for Paris, where he remained for two miserable weeks, before returning on foot to Charleville – more than 200 kilometres – to fester as popular sentiment in Paris turned against the Government for complying with the terms imposed by Prussia. The armistice had been signed over the heads of the city's inhabitants, already politicized by four months of hunger and isolation during the siege; now they shuddered to see a new National Assembly dominated by conservatives – and conservative liberals – including some 400 monarchist deputies. An insurrection began in Montmartre on 18 March, when the crowd, confronted by Government troops, persuaded them not to open fire. The Government withdrew to Versailles. It was the beginning of the Paris Commune. Municipal elections followed and, on 28 March, the Commune's representative leaders took office. The city embarked on a brief moment of self-rule and another bitter siege, complete with bombardment, directed not from Berlin this time but from Versailles.

Rimbaud naturally greeted the proclamation of the Commune with delight: he took to the streets of Charleville shouting, ‘Order is vanquished!’ It's likely that he was back in Paris again before the city was brutally subdued by Versaillais troops at the end of May. Yet his Communard credentials are obscure. Neither Graham Robb nor another recent biographer, Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Arthur Rimbaud, une question de présence, 1991), is in any doubt about this third trip to the city, some time in April 1871. Even so, there is no agreement as to its significance. Rimbaud was hardly a dedicated revolutionary. If anything, he was in search of a dedicated revolution. His idea was not to set his poetry manfully at the service of the Commune, but to steep the first in the second, partly as an act of solidarity, but more pertinently – on the business side – as an investment in the radicalized approach to writing that was now his priority: go to extremes (go to Paris), observe the effects.

A batch of so-called Communard poems, including ‘The Hands of Jeanne-Marie’, vouch for Rimbaud's partisan feelings about the Commune, if not his presence in Paris. But there is also the strange and beautiful ‘Heart of a Clown’, both an epiphany and the record of a sexual shaming, set in Paris and dated May 1871. We're to imagine a Communard barracks full of soldiers: irregulars as well as radicalized National Guardsmen (the military ballast of the Commune) and pro-Communard members of the 88th Regiment, who had disobeyed the order to shoot in Montmartre. They are off duty, drunk and up for an ugly scene. The ‘I’ of the poem is at once the victim of a degradation and a witness to it. ‘Heart of a Clown’ has been read as the poet's record of his rape by Communard militias, but it's clearly more – and less – than that. It speaks of a terrible disillusion in the face of human brutality. At the same time it is a perverse, vitalist tribute to the destructive force of an idealized revolutionary class, from which nothing, not even purity, is immune.

The Seer

If Rimbaud had indeed been in barracks in Paris, then it's quite possible that he was enrolled as a Communard irregular, but not for long: the likeliest dates are some time between mid-April and mid-May of 1871. The Commune was put down in a week of blood-letting at the end of May, by which time Rimbaud was back in the Ardennes. We know this because the two letters to Izambard and Paul Demeny in which he outlines a poetic ‘method’ are franked 13 and 15 May respectively, and written from Charleville. They are manifestos for a Commune-like shake-up of poetry – a revolution in the processes of production. What they show, above all, is Rimbaud's distaste for the idea that the poet's task might simply consist in a workaday tinkering with the steady flow of information through the senses.

Rimbaud was by now much more than a young man with strong political opinions: he was busy demolishing and rebuilding on the site he knew best. As a poet he would henceforth be a militant advocate of the unforeseen: nothing less would do. The letters to Izambard and Demeny call the ‘self’ forcefully into play as the agent of a new visionary poetics. But it is not the integral, troubled, narcissistic self of Rimbaud's most obvious predecessor, Baudelaire, whose genius he admired (though he thought him diminished by his ‘artistic’ milieu). On the contrary, the Rimbaudian self is a harsh experiment in disfiguring. It is wilfully distended and distressed, offering the maximum surface area to which unusual information (the ‘unknown’) can adhere. The letter to Demeny speaks famously of the poet becoming ‘a seer’ by means of a ‘long, immense and reasoned disordering of all, the senses’. The word ‘reasoned’ is important, as John Sturrock explains in connection with Rimbaud's letters (see below). Alcohol and hashish had a role in this disordering, but the decisive factor was Rimbaud's intolerance of received wisdom and his hunger for experiment. ‘Let us ask poets for the new – ideas and forms,’ he says in the letter to Demeny.

The labours of the seer bore fruit in a handful of poems, including ‘Seven-year-old Poets’ and ‘First Communion’, composed during the summer of 1871. In August Rimbaud wrote to Banville again, enclosing ‘To the Poet on the Matter of Flowers’. This long poem is a joke at the expense of the Parnassians, while remaining a homage to Banville (the Rimbaud scholar André Guyaux describes it perfectly as a study in ‘insolence’). It is unmistakably a modern piece of writing, with its commotion of ironies, its plunges into obscurity and its modulating tones of voice: a tour de force – and probably Rimbaud's farewell to the Parnassian model. He nonetheless regarded Paul Verlaine – one of Le Parnasse contemporain's younger contributors – as a great poet (a ‘seer’, indeed).

On the basis of the two letters and eight poems he received from Charleville, Verlaine felt much the same about the importunate Rimbaud, and duly invited him to Paris. Rimbaud's preparations for the visit included the composition of a big poem, something audacious to spring on the capital. Shortly before he was due to leave, in late September, he went for a walk with his loyal friend Ernest Delahaye. Graham Robb's account builds elegantly on Delahaye's recollections:

It was a sunny autumn afternoon. They sat down at the edge of a wood and Rimbaud pulled out some sheets of paper. He had written a 100-line poem ‘to show the people in Paris’. The verse was quite regular, but the content was extraordinary. Abruptly, without any rhetorical introduction, a boat recounted its adventures since the massacre of its crew – its astounding visions and gradual disintegration.¹

Delahaye recalls Rimbaud reading ‘without emphasis and with no vocal flourishes, rather convulsively, like a child telling of some great grief’.² And why not? ‘Drunken Boat’, after all, is a poem that ends in defeat. It is also a spectacular literary success, perhaps Rimbaud's most famous work, and a ‘seer’ poem par excellence. Robb sees clear links between the poem and the letter to Demeny, both of which envisage ‘purification by dissolution, the loosening of the rivets and tackle that bind the personality, visions teetering on the brink of the incomprehensible, and a strange nostalgia for the future’.³

Paris, Verlaine

In Paris, Verlaine was only a little quicker to show off his boy-genius from the provinces than he was to fall in love with him. That process nevertheless began under the nose of his pregnant wife and the roof of his in-laws, the Mautés, who provided Rimbaud with a room on his arrival. He proceeded to make himself insufferable, calling for the removal of a picture from one of the walls (he didn't like it) and apparently vandalizing an ivory Christ (religion was still an abomination to him). Beyond the Mauté household, meanwhile, as Verlaine swished Rimbaud hither and thither with growing excitement, the condescending approval began to wane.

One of the reasons was that the homosexual character of their relationship was becoming more ostentatious, and this was not a state of affairs that many in Verlaine's circle, ankle-deep in their nervous bohemianism, found easy to accept. But Rimbaud had other, startling ways of giving offence. Early on, he told the veteran Banville that it was time to dump the alexandrine, the main joist in the edifice of French poetry dating back to the twelfth century: not such a good idea, in view of the Parnassians' high regard for the rules. In the garret Banville lent him, after his eviction from the Mauté household, he went to the window, stripped off in full view of the neighbours and threw his clothes on to the roof. (Banville told the journalist Rodolphe Darzens that he had also slept in his boots, smashed the china and sold the furniture.) Lodging with the bohemian poet and inventor Charles Cros, he broke a plaster bust and tore up back-issues of a journal containing his host's verses, which he used as lavatory paper. He cut Verlaine in a café during a game with a knife, and again in the street. He tried to stab the photographer Etienne Carjat with a sword-cane. He also claimed to have ejaculated into a glass of milk, destined to be drunk by the consumptive pianist Ernest Cabaner, while poor Cabaner was out of the room.

Many people who had never heard of his antics simply took an instant dislike to him. Everyone was impressed, for better or worse, by his looks. He reminded Mallarmé of ‘a laundress, because of his great hands, red and chapped by the changes from warm to cold’. A few years later, the young poet Jean Richepin spoke of ‘his gauche peasant appearance, his big hands and feet, his hair like thatch’ but also of his ‘angel's eyes’. He was in every way a striking figure, whose charm would merely have added to his awfulness. And of that charm there's little doubt. Delahaye speaks of him rubbing his eyes with his knuckles, like a sleepy child, and blushing if he were introduced to anyone new. A luminous innocence glimmered through the crust of monstrousness he had cultivated so assiduously.

The poetry from this period is sparse. ‘The Seekers of Lice’ perhaps – though it may have been written earlier, during the summer – and the untitled poem ‘What are they to us…’, a lament for the Commune in which the revolutionary ideal itself seems extinct beside the cosmic overhaul the poem has in mind. The hermetic sonnet ‘Vowels’, inspired by a synaesthetic game that Rimbaud and Cabaner used to play at the piano, or perhaps by an illustrated children's alphabet that Rimbaud recalled from the nursery, was also composed at this time. So too were the parodies and not-quite-parodies he wrote as a member of the Zutistes' circle – a fringe group of extravagantly bohemian poets, anarchists and survivor-Communards who convened for regular drinking sessions in a hotel overlooking the Boulevard St Michel, with Rimbaud and Cabaner in charge of alcohol supplies. The Album Zutique, in which members wrote their entries – mocking, salacious, often spiced with images of pederasty – contains some twenty pieces by Rimbaud, among them, a duet with Verlaine, ‘Idol. Arsehole Sonnet’, and ‘Reminiscence of an Aged Cretin’. Rimbaud's ‘systematic disordering’ was proceeding apace in all domains, including the senses.

The relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine has been raked over and over. It was a hectic affair that asked much of Rimbaud and almost everything of Verlaine, including near ruin and a year and a half in Belgian prisons. Rimbaud himself was extremely demanding, though he could seem to want all and nothing by turns; he was loyal, even in his negligence, capricious in his utter single-mindedness, given to violence and provocation while capable of childlike remorse and tenderness. He hoped, perhaps, in taking up with Verlaine, to find a respite from the worst of his own solitude, and imagined that Verlaine – so incapable for so much of the time – would thrive under his supervision, itself a kind of charity he felt bound to bestow, without much sanctimony. On this basis, the two men would set about the great project of transforming poetry together. But Rimbaud's charity was his beneficiary's torment. He was a harsh taskmaster, for whom Verlaine was too often guilty of backsliding. In the end he reduced Verlaine to a state of agonized dependency, brutally evoked in A Season in Hell (‘Delirium I’).

Sooner or later, in connection with Verlaine, Rimbaud's sexuality comes up for discussion. If this was his only significant homosexual relationship, then how far was he ‘really’ homosexual? To the poet Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud's homosexuality began as ‘no more than another element of his “reasoned disordering”’.⁴ Graham Robb concurs: homosexuality was ‘a blank space on the social map’ and thus ‘a powerful invitation’.⁵ There is no reason why an icon of revolt and adolescent genius shouldn't become a gay icon too. Yet it's hard to keep him fast to any sexual identity: the problem lies not with his sexuality, but with his ‘identity’ as such – something of an experimental site between 1870 and 1875. That, no doubt, would have been part of his attraction, and part of what encouraged Verlaine to head off with him, abandoning his wife and child for a life of mesmerizing unpredictability. The affair ended in Brussels in July 1873, when Verlaine pulled a revolver and shot Rimbaud in the wrist. It was less than two years since they had met.

Last Poems, First Prose-poems

In the meantime there were important changes in Rimbaud's work. The first turning point came in the spring of 1872, when he left Paris for a brief stay in Charleville, allowing Verlaine to take stock of his unenviable family situation. The great poem sometimes associated with this period is ‘Memory’, a dramatic encryption of the brief Rimbaud–Cuif marriage – the fugitive male, the stern mother – in the symbolic world of an Ardennes landscape animated by the thoughts of a desperate young boy. Verse after verse, it reckons the weight that family history might exert on any childhood – and the haunting under-exposure of memory itself, as patches of shadow and grainy light give way to areas of unreadable darkness.

‘Memory’ is not an easy piece of writing, despite its use of familiar stagecraft: rhyming quatrains, alexandrines (though without the time-honoured rules that govern them), the dressing of a landscape, followed by the introduction of figures, and so on. But when Rimbaud set off again for Paris at the end of May, another development was under way. This time, the props – the twelve-syllable line certainly, but the vestiges of narrative, too – would be abandoned in favour of a sparse, declarative lyric which draws on the ‘naive’ forms of nursery-rhyme, popular song and comic opera. (The Last Poems in which these lyrics feature were also referred to as Chansons or ‘Songs’; they include ‘Comedy of Thirst’, ‘Song from the Highest Tower’, ‘Festivals of Hunger’ and ‘Happiness’.) Yet the declarations themselves, sometimes in lines of five or seven syllables, are closer to incantation than direct statement – charms, scraps of prophetic utterance, lamentations, records of unappeasable longing:

Turn, my hungers! Hungers, graze

On fields of bran!

Suck up the blithe poison

Of convolvulus…

(‘Festivals of Hunger’)

Even as these strange songs were being set down, another form had suggested itself to Rimbaud. The Deserts of Love is thought to have been written around this time, or even earlier, and may have been inspired by the prose-poems of Baudelaire. It is certainly a foretaste of Rimbaud's own, of which about forty would eventually surface as Illuminations. How likely is it that he was already experimenting with the prose-poem in the early part of 1872? Consider the following sequence of events: Rimbaud returned to Paris in May, spent about two months in the city and left with Verlaine for Belgium, where they stayed, despite the efforts of Verlaine's wife and mother-in-law, until September, when they took passage to England and found lodgings off the Tottenham Court Road; in November Verlaine wrote from London to a friend in Paris, asking him to recover some personal effects, including letters from Rimbaud which contained a number of ‘verse and prose-poems’. It's thought that these were destroyed by Verlaine's wife, but the request in itself is evidence that the prose-poem was most likely a project in view before Rimbaud left Charleville for Paris, and that it may well have gained a preliminary shape.

The Illuminations, of which only three (or arguably two) are not in prose, present Rimbaud scholars, and the general reader, with several difficulties. In the first place, though they are among the most famous pieces of modern European literature, they lack the consistency, and the feel, of a thought-out sequence of work. They are not, in the words of André Guyaux, ‘a single text with a beginning and an end’.⁶ Indeed, the poems seem to stand as individual works, or pairs, or runs; there is no obvious over-arching design. A haze of conjecture surrounds the dating of the Illuminations. A Season in Hell always posed the biggest problem here: Rimbaud's passionate resignation from the world of letters encouraged the belief that none of the Illuminations could have been written after its publication in 1873. Yet the facts are otherwise, and a curious remark in the opening sequence of A Season in Hell – ‘Since we're waiting for the last of my low little deeds’ – is now thought to be a veiled admission that there was still a collection of prose-poems in the offing. Quite how the Illuminations divide on either side of A Season in Hell is uncertain. What matters is that they do, and that the various phases of poetic production overlap, so that the oracular lyrics of 1872 were probably being composed alongside early drafts of prose-poems; and then, as Rimbaud settled into London with Verlaine, a new idea began to infiltrate his thinking on the prose-poems: that of a work to end all work, or at any rate his own.

Selected Poems and Letters

Contents

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Translation

Chronology

Introduction

Poems, 1869–71

The Seer

Paris, Verlaine

Last Poems, First Prose-poems