Making a choice he was later intermittently to regret, Verlaine abandoned his young wife and new baby to join Rimbaud in what became a picaresque adventure played out largely in London, and interrupted by occasional homecomings to France, and to Belgium. The saga of dire poverty in cheap boarding-houses came to its infamous end in Brussels in July 1873, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud, wounding him in the wrist—the desperate attempt of the terminally weak poet to detain the far stronger, impatient younger man who was already becoming remote from him. Rimbaud had grown sick of Verlaine’s vacillations, and there is good reason also to suppose that he had tired of homosexuality, ultimately just one among others of his voyant-inspired experiments, a considered dérèglement, and serving only to reaffirm the old, bitter lesson about the failure of love.6 By the time of the shooting incident, Verlaine was of no further interest to the unforgiving Rimbaud, either as a lover, a poet, or as a human being worthy of respect. Verlaine ended up in prison, while Rimbaud returned to the family farm in Roche, near Charleville and wrote the only book he ever saw through to publication, A Season in Hell.

For a long time the majority opinion was that this work must have been Rimbaud’s last piece of creative writing, his farewell to the old life, old loves, old aspirations, old poetry, so bitterly does it sever all attachments to everything that had gone before. But in the light of the latest evidence most scholars are now certain that the prose poems of the Illuminations were written before and after A Season. Absolutely reliable dating and an understanding of Rimbaud’s precise intentions remain just out of reach, but the indications are that A Season was not intended to repudiate all poetry so much as the poetry which he himself had created up till then. Whether or not Illuminations should be included in this condemnation is a moot point. But in one of A Season’s most telling sections, ‘Second Delirium: Alchemy of the Word’, Rimbaud appears to distance himself from a too-exalted ambition for poetry, indeed, from any ambition at all. Its very title suggests the failure of alchemy, whereby poetic language should have provided the key to unlock the final door on to the radiant kingdom of truth. The first line speaks of the story he is going to tell of ‘one of my madnesses’, which, he adds later, threatened his health. That madness was a sustained hallucination, in which he saw a mosque in the place of a factory, or coaches rolling through the sky, or a drawing-room at the bottom of a lake. Rimbaud chastizes the visions and himself: ‘I thought I could invent a poetic language accessible one day to all the senses.’ He scoffs at some lines he once wrote:

Found again. What?
Eternity.
The sea lost
In the sun

pre-echoing the resolution claimed by the very last words of A Season. He has been, he says, a buffoon. The poetry of vision is a farce. If A Season in Hell is the diary of a farcical failure, ironically defeat is conceded in beautiful writing, short and cryptic verses such as the lines just given. Other examples are ‘Song from the Highest Tower’, a poignant lament for lost possibilities, and one of his great songs of yearning; and ‘Four a.m. in Summertime’, not only a metaphor for the stubborn endurance of the poetic quest, but also an expression of Rimbaud’s sympathies with workers—whose ranks, as the ‘Letters of the Visionary’ made clear, he will never join. A Season in Hell is not only critical of certain poetic enterprises: it reveals as well a contempt for society, for its damaging institutions and its politics which feeble-minded and vicious men shape, and which shape them.

A Season closes with a section pertinently entitled ‘The Impossible’—and here Rimbaud appears to have run out of options. The young poet resembles more a spiritually bereft adult than a lad of 18. On the verge of silence, however, he goes on, and completes the great collection of prose poems Illuminations. Then, up to his death, will come the years in which he all but disappears, glimpsed intermittently in matter-of-fact letters home, eighteen years of a gruelling odyssey halfway round the world, and during which apparently he writes not another single line of poetry.

Illuminations

How any of Illuminations can have been written after the apparent impasse of A Season in Hell may seem puzzling. There is a persuasive view that this sequence of prose poems—only two are in verse, free verse at that—expresses the final disorganization of an ‘I’ so multi-faceted that it has become too brittle to survive. It and its visions must shatter. The darkness of Rimbaud’s ultimate silence looms even more than in A Season. The title Illuminations itself has more than one possible meaning. Verlaine said that it should be taken in an English sense of coloured plates; illuminated manuscripts suggest themselves too. Beyond this, however, ‘illumination’ also denotes something more abstract, a revelation, an insight or flash of understanding, the moment when a truth is brilliantly revealed, only to vanish as quickly—similar to what James Joyce meant by the name ‘epiphany’.

However they are defined, the Illuminations come as close as anything in Rimbaud to vision. In writing which dances on a tightrope strung between coherence and chaos, there comes into being a bedazzlement of events and moments, people and apparitions, dissolving as quickly as they appear, as if each illumination was like a waking dream. In trying to find a unifying thread throughout these pieces, we can have recourse to what I mentioned earlier as the third interpretation of this assertion ‘I is another’, one that focuses on the concept of authorship.