Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet who is known for his influence on modern literature and arts, which prefigured surrealism. Born in Charleville-Mézières, he started writing at a very young age and was a prodigious student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home amidst the Franco-Prussian War. After running away, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, he began the bulk of his literary...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 October 1854
CountryFrance
There shall be poets! When woman's unmeasured bondage shall be broken, when she shall live for and through herself, man--hitherto detestable--having let her go, she, too, will be poet! Woman will find the unknown! Will her ideational worlds be different from ours? She will come upon strange, unfathomable, repellent, delightful things; we shall take them, we shall comprehend them.
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?
And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! - But the great Faith is Love!
And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one--and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ....So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!
one single true word: it is, COME BACK. I want to be with you, I love you. If you listen to this you will prove your courage and sincerity. Otherwise, I am sorry for you. But I love you. I kiss you and we'll see eachother again...
O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.
In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.
True life is elsewhere
As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.
You will always be a hyena.
Eternity is the sun mixed with the sea