The impulse towards life as ascesis was as strong as in the poetry stage, and it chose poverty as its authentication—for if, in A Season in Hell, he claims to loathe poverty, he also says in the same work that sound sleep is impossible for the rich. From now on his life would be lived principally in the fearsome conditions of the Horn of Africa. However, his deprivations, endured with a will of iron, were to prove too much. Rimbaud’s body was finally defeated; possibly his spirit too. Shortly before this haunted, cancer-ridden amputee died on a hospital bed in Marseilles, three weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday, his sister Isabelle claimed that he made confession. Whether or not Rimbaud embraced Catholicism on his deathbed, the story is accepted by those who see a religious centre in his make-up.

What Rimbaud’s life and poetry certainly do represent is a search for the sense, the truth of this life in this world. In that he is thoroughly modern—words he uses in the final lines of A Season in Hell. Rimbaud’s gaze, his intelligence, burn reality’s surfaces to find what is beyond. He says, again in A Season, that the poet is the one who steals fire, and in his acceptance of that mission, with its Promethean attendant agonies, darknesses, and final failure, Rimbaud is modern, indeed exemplary. Everything about his life seems to have encapsulated modern man’s drama, acted out at its most intense pitch.

Rimbaud’s most significant artistic influence, arguably, is on Surrealism, the movement which, bent on overthrowing the old icons of art, saw in him one of its few legitimate antecedents. For the Surrealists, Rimbaud was the visionary who taps directly into the unconscious, bringing what is hidden to the surface. Surrealism, the child of Freud and the horrors of the First World War, hates rationality and logic because their inherent mendacity all through history has brought individual unhappiness and general injustice to the world. Surrealism demanded that life should be a permanent revolution in every domain, from the most intimate to the most public. In short, it echoed Rimbaud’s call to change life, and his claim that one means of doing so was to produce a poetry which broke the conventional bonds of grammar, syntax, form, and image. However, Surrealism’s favouring of automatic writing puts it outside Rimbaud’s aesthetic: the material of its poetry is received and transmitted irresponsibly, passively, with eyes closed, as it were. While this has affinities with Rimbaud’s ‘I am being thought’, his own view of poetry, and the discipline needed to reach the unknown, is that it has to be worked for with a will, with eyes wide open.

Rimbaud has been admired in France by writers and poets as different as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Claudel, Paul Valéry, René Char, and Jean Genet. Albert Camus, who evaluated Rimbaud in terms of philosophical révolte, while regretting the retreat into silence of the poet he calls the greatest of his time, considered exemplary his wish that ‘life must be changed’—a wish that was reiterated with force during the 1968 anti-government uprising in France, the événements, when Rimbaud’s words became a favoured slogan.

Rimbaud’s reputation stands very high today. He has been revered by artists and performers from many different backgrounds, including the Beat generation of poets in America, the singer Bob Dylan, the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, the actor Gérard Depardieu, the English composers Benjamin Britten and John Tavener, the French footballer Eric Cantona, and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. The English playwright Christopher Hampton’s Total Eclipse, about the affair between Rimbaud and Verlaine, reached a wide audience both as a stage-play and as a film.

It is clear, then, that Rimbaud’s enduring influence is not exclusively literary and artistic. He lives on as an example, an icon. He has been championed as the great anti-rationalist, not only in France, but also in Germany, Italy, and America, while in the former Soviet Union he was fêted not only as an honorary Communard but also as a Bolshevik. According to requirements, Rimbaud has been claimed variously as prophet, angel, superman, bad boy, God, and Devil.

Legend and influences aside, Rimbaud’s writing and life resemble those of no other poet. Verlaine once gave a definition of him that is as accurate as it is evocative: ‘l’homme aux semelles de vent’—’the man with the wind in his heels’.

NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION

The editor of Rimbaud faces the considerable headache of establishing the text. It is not always possible to give a date of composition with any certainty, and, as a number of his pieces have more than one version, it can become a matter of personal judgement as to which version to prefer. Over the years editions have often differed one from another, sometimes substantially, and have tended to reflect the state of Rimbaud scholarship at any given time.

The major editions of recent years—by Antoine Adam; by Suzanne Bernard, revised by André Guyaux; by Jean-Luc Steinmetz; and, most recently, by Steve Murphy—present the verse poems each in a more or less different configuration. Murphy’s 1999 critical edition of the verse poems, the monumental first volume in a planned series of all Rimbaud’s writing, gives every version and variant of every poem (including fragments of poems), and their chronologies. While his research has been exhaustive, Murphy himself recognizes in his preface that no single edition, his own included, can be taken as gospel. If his multi-version edition of Rimbaud is the fullest, the Bernard/Guyaux and the Steinmetz editions are also excellent—well researched and annotated, clearly presented, and informative. The notes in Bernard/Guyaux particularly are very full and valuable. The Steinmetz gives a clear sense of Rimbaud’s evolution, from the early verse poems (the so-called ‘Douai Notebook’) onwards, and, for this reason, I have preferred Steinmetz’s order for the present volume.