Genie, for one, hardly suggests a gravure coloriée, nor do those poems which were Surrealist before the word was invented or became a movement. Here the temptation to quote Shakespeare is almost irresistible. For, after all, what matters is that the poems do lift the spirit and dazzle the mind, besides quickening all the senses. In any case, since we must necessarily use the title vouched for by Verlaine, I think it should stand as he first recalled it before time and alcohol muddled his memory. I have therefore, following de Lacoste, dropped the too definite article, without, I might add, also adopting as he does, Verlaine’s title, “painted plates.”

 

The two poems Marine and Movement, which now take their place among the Illuminations, were formerly classified as late verse poems. They are not in the form of any of the other Illuminations, are not strictly speaking prose poems but vers libres. However, the fact that Marine was written on the same page as Fête d’Hiver justifies its reclassification. In the case of Movement the reason is less obvious, except that it is not rhymed. Until recently the late verse poems were included under the general title Illuminations. Berrichon gave subtitles: I. Vers Nouveaux et Chansons; II. Poèmes en Prose. Now scholars agree that the manuscript of Illuminations contained only prose poems. For once they are willing to believe Verlaine, who in Les Poètes Maudits wrote: “He roamed all the continents, all the oceans after writing, still in prose, a series of superb fragments, the Illuminations.” And this brings us to the controversial question of whether these poems, “still in prose” (Verlaine says Rimbaud wrote no verse after 1872), were all written before Une Saison en Enfer, or after, or some before, some after.

In spite of Verlaine’s categorical statement in his preface to the first edition, that the book “was written from 1873 to 1875 in Belgium as well as in England and throughout Germany,” sixty-eight years later Enid Starkie, the eminent English scholar and one of the foremost Rimbaud detectives, can speak of the question of the dating of Illuminations as “the burning Rimbaud problem today.” This is because Rimbaud’s first hagiographer, Paterne Berrichon, who was also posthumously his brother-in-law, and Ernest Delahaye, his boyhood friend, in their 1898 edition of Rimbaud’s works, gave as their opinion that “a comparison of Illuminations and A Season in Hell disproves the dates assigned them by Verlaine….” They concluded that all the Illuminations were written before Une Saison en Enfer (dated April—August, 1873, by the poet himself). For Berrichon’s canonizing purposes A Season in Hell served admirably as a proof of Rimbaud’s final repudiation of his past and a sign of grace. It was more appropriate than Illuminations as a swan song for a saint. Ever since then biographers and exegetes have preferred the testimony of Berrichon and Delahaye to that of Verlaine, and the cardinal tenet of the Rimbaldien cult has been that Une Saison en Enfer was the nineteen-year-old boy’s farewell to literature, his mea culpa. For years, moreover, Isabelle’s story of how her brother burned the entire edition of the work he had himself had printed, provided apodictical evidence until the "holocaust" legend had regretfully to be abandoned. The edition (five hundred copies) turned up intact at the printer’s in Brussels. Before that the only copies in existence, the six au-thor’s copies Rimbaud had himself distributed, were priceless collectors’ items. Plenty of fire however was left in the poem itself, and the farewell-to-literature theme, with endless variations, persisted. Then came de Lacoste’s Rimbaud et le Problème des Illuminations, purporting to prove, by a comparative study of the Illuminations manuscript and dated Rimbaud autographs, that all the Illuminations were written after the Season. If he were right, it would make nonsense of much Rimbaud exegesis and deflate some fine Rimbaldien prose. Although de Lacoste gives other reasons for his conviction, his main argument is graphological. What seemed to clinch the matter was his interesting discovery that some, or at least parts of some of the poems, were in the handwriting of Germain Nouveau, with whom Rimbaud had lived for a while in London in 1874, and whom he had not met until late the previous year, after the Season had been written and printed. The farewell-to-literature exponents were by no means routed by de Lacoste’s triumphant book. His graphological proof, they were quick to point out, was no proof at all for, the manuscripts being copies as they convincingly demonstrated, Rimbaud could have written the poems at any previous date. Since then, eminent sleuths on both sides have been searching for new evidence—biographical, psychological or mystical, and are digging deeper into the poems themselves for buried relics in vocabulary, syntax, themes, mood, etc., which, like scattered bones, when assembled will prove the date of the body. That the poems may have been written some before, some after, is also an acceptable theory to many, and has the merit of not conflicting with the known facts in the case. No one who has read Une Saison en Enfer will, I am sure, deny that it is a “mea culpa”—a heartbreaking confession, not of faith, but of failure. One might call it a sort of New Year’s resolution which in the end Rimbaud actually kept. He did not, however, say farewell to literature as one waves a handkerchief at a departing ship or train or plane. That theory, the facts disprove. More poet still than penitent, he rushed his confession to the printer. His intense ambition to be a man of letters, his passionate will to be a poet had not been completely consumed in the hell fires of his disgust and despair.