Certainly, though, Madame Rimbaud was insensitive to Arthur’s needs, and she nurtured only an austere conformity and piety in her children. Did Rimbaud love or forgive his mother? His sinister nickname for her—’the mouth of darkness’—suggests not. Hence the pain which so marks a litany of poems, not only of loneliness but also of rage against women (tempered, it must be added, by sympathy for their historically low and abused situation—see ‘First Communions’, for example).

In the first thirty or so of his poems the effects of rage and desolation take artistic shape, and form themselves into a poetic vocation. Against the background misery at home and the boredom of Charleville, and then, after mid-1870, the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of the discredited Second Empire, Rimbaud wrote a succession of poems which collectively stand as an indictment of repression of every kind. Whether the subject be politics (‘The Blacksmith’, ‘Caesars’ Rage’), social life (‘Customs Men, Seated’), war (‘Dead of ‘92’, ‘Asleep in the Valley’), or women (‘Nina Answers Back’, ‘Venus Emerging’), Rimbaud’s gaze searches out hypocrisy, self-interest, small-mindedness, injustice. Driven by his nature and experience, his imperative became to reject the old life and to find a new way of being—utterly lucid, rigorously honest—and to be attained by new love: love must be reinvented, as he says in A Season in Hell. Whatever the full meaning of that love might be (it has mysterious and mystical qualities), Rimbaud knew that it could not be found unless he broke the old ties. In ‘Seven-Year-Old Poets’, that muscular, unsettled poem of 1871, written just before his third flight from Charleville, not only did he confront himself and his mother with brutal directness, but, in the last, splendid line, he prophesied adventure, departure for a new life: ‘thinking | Violent thoughts of getting under sail.’

Visionary Poetry

The year 1871 was a crucial one in France’s history, and marked a turning-point in Rimbaud’s life. Against a backcloth of national defeat, reactionary politics, and brutal repression,2 he produced some of his most important writing, including ‘Drunken Boat’ and two letters in which he enunciated his vision of a new poetry. By the autumn of that year, he was in Paris, offending social and poetic correctness and beginning to turn his back on the old life. His early phase was over. Ahead lay the sojourn in London with Verlaine, the years of vagrancy, and the towering prose poetry of A Season in Hell and Illuminations.

Rimbaud got ‘under sail’ when his poetic vision became fully defined, and he understood that poetry has nothing to do with easy pleasures and recreation but must be a total way of living in the world—or, as Yves Bonnefoy terms it, an ascesis.3 What this involved was the discipline to reach and abide in the deepest, most authentic level of the self, however shocking and unacceptable this might be to oneself or others. For all that Rimbaud considered himself a pagan of inferior race who hated Christianity, the great life-denying force of our culture, his instincts were not wholly dissimilar to those of religion. Poetry for him was the hope of charity, albeit a hope on which he cast the gravest of doubts in the final section of A Season in Hell.

It is in the two so-called ‘Letters of the Visionary’ that Rimbaud sets out his new concept of poetry. Written from Charleville in May 1871, the first of these is addressed to George Izambard and outlines Rimbaud’s central concern of how one is to become a poet. He says that he has unashamedly adopted the position of a cynical outsider, the drop-out who refuses to work or to conform to society’s rules, but who will rather scrounge his sustenance from friends, for whom in return he will perform unspecified services. He implies that he can fulfil his obligations to society by becoming a true poet, as opposed to those who hold up their subjectivities for admiration. The target here is the Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century, whose solipsistic modes still largely prevailed decades later. By contrast, Rimbaud wants to write ‘objective’ poetry, becoming what he terms a ‘workman’—a concept which recurs throughout his work, and which might appear paradoxical given his contempt for labour as traditionally defined. His idea of the poet’s work entails idleness, vice and depravity. The implied rationale is that this approach is essential if he is to reach a state in which objective poetry can be written: for this is, not a poetry of objects, but one in which the poet transcends the psychology of the self and overcomes egoism, either deliberate (as in Romanticism) or unintended. Here we come to the key word: Rimbaud declares that he is ‘working to become a visionary’ (voyant). Anticipating Izambard’s puzzlement, he adds that he neither can nor will explain the term. But he does go on to speak of the unknown (l’inconnu), objective poetry’s aim, which can only be attained by the ‘systematic disordering of all the senses’ (his italics). Prophetically, he concedes that great suffering will be involved, and must be accepted. He goes on to assert that it is wrong to say: ‘I think.’ We should say: ‘I am being thought’ (on me pense). Rimbaud’s analysis culminates in the extraordinary claim that ‘I is another’ (Je est un autre).

This is the heart of the matter, and the point is developed much more fully in the second letter, written to his friend the minor poet Paul Demeny. Rimbaud’s apparent bad grammar says that the self, the ‘I’, is neither stable nor properly recognized by the subject, the experiencing ‘I’. Setting himself against the psychological orthodoxy of a reliable, fixed self, Rimbaud’s idea may be interpreted in at least two ways: first, that the self is indeed a meaningful entity, but has been forever wrongly conceived and understood; or secondly, that the self is so fragmented that to posit its indivisibility is wishful thinking. These two interpretations may amount to the same thing in the end, but to the extent that they are discrete the second is the one conventionally accepted, and it looks forward to some recent theories about the mind and the brain.