To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that’s the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought. Pardon the pun.*

I is some one else. So much the worse for the wood that discovers it’s a violin, and to hell with the heedless who cavil about something they know nothing about!

You’re not a teacher for me. I offer you the following: is it satire, as you would say? Is it poetry? At any rate it’s fantasy. But I beg you, please don’t underscore it, not with pencil or too much with thought either:

Poem enclosed: The Tortured Heart (Le Coeur Supplicié).

This does not mean nothing.—Answer: c/o M. Deverrièrre, for A.R.

Affectionate greetings,

Arthur Rimbaud.

 

*“Allusion, according to G. Izambard, to an historic pun. When Voltaire came back from England, Louis XV is said to have asked him: ‘What did you learn over there?’ ‘To think, Sire’ (penser, to think) ‘Horses?’ (panser, to groom horses)”

  J.-M. Carré, Lettres de la Vie Litéraire d’Arthur Rimbaud.

 

LETTER TO PAUL DEMENY

(DOUAI)

Charleville, May 15, 1871

I have decided to give you an hour of new literature. I begin at once with a psalm of current interest.

Poem enclosed: Paris War Song (Chant de Guerre Parisien).

And now follows a discourse on the future of poetry:—

All ancient poetry culminated in Greek poetry, harmonious Life. From Greece to the Romantic movement—Middle Ages—there are men of letters, versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, nothing but rhymed prose, a game, fatty degeneration and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is the pure, the strong, the great man. Had his rhymes been effaced, his hemistitches got mixed up, today the Divine Imbecile would be as unknown as any old author of Origins. After Racine the game gets moldy. It lasted for two thousand years!

Neither a joke, nor a paradox. Reason inspires me with more certainties on this subject than any Young-France ever had angers. Besides, newcomers have a right to condemn their ancestors: one is at home and there’s plenty of time.

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!! The Romantics? who prove so clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is, the idea sung and understood by the singer.

For, I is some one else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I witness the birth of my thought: I look at it, I listen to it: I give a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths or comes bursting onto the stage.

If the old fools had not hit upon the false significance of the Ego only, we should not now have to sweep away these millions of skeletons who, since time immemorial, have been accumulating the products of those cockeyed intellects claiming themselves to be the authors.

In Greece, I have said, verses and lyres, rhythms: Action. After that, music and rhymes are games, pasttimes. The study of this past charms the curious: many delight in reviving these antiquities:—the pleasure is theirs.

Universal Mind has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men would pick up part of these fruits of the brain; they acted through, wrote books with them: and so things went along, since man did not work on himself, not being yet awake, or not yet in the fullness of his dream. Writers were functionaries. Author, creator, poet,—that man has never existed!

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it: it seems simple: in every brain a natural development is accomplished: so many egoists proclaim themselves authors; others attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! But the soul has to be made monstrous, that’s the point:—like comprachicos, if you like! Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.

One must, I say, be a visionary, make oneself a visionary.

The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their quintessences. Ineffable torture in which he will need all his faith and super-human strength, the great criminal, the great sick-man, the accursed,—and the supreme Savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has cultivated his soul—richer to begin with than any other! He arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those unnamable, unutterable and innumerable things: there will come other horrible workers: they will begin at the horizons where he has succumbed.

—continued in six minutes—

Here, I interpolate a second psalm outside the text: kindly lend a friendly ear and everybody will be charmed. I hold the bow in my hand, I begin:

Poem enclosed, My Little Sweethearts (Mes Petites Amoureuses).

That’s that.