And if I weren’t afraid of making you spend over 60 centimes for postage—I poor waif * without a red cent to my name for the last seven months!—I would offer you my Paris Lovers (Amants de Paris ), one hundred hexameters, dear Sir, and my Death of Paris (Mort de Paris),** two hundred hexameters!

—I continue—

So then, the poet is truly a thief of fire.

Humanity is his responsibility, even the animals; he must see to it that his inventions can be smelled, felt, heard. If what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form, if it is formless, he gives it formlessness. A language must be found; as a matter of fact, all speech being an idea, the time of a universal language will come! One has to be an academician—deader than a fossil—to finish a dictionary of any language at all. The weak-minded, beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, would soon be raving mad!

This harangue would be of the soul for the soul, summing up everything, perfumes, sounds, colors, thought grappling thought, and pulling. The poet would define the amount of unknown arising in his time in the universal soul; he would give more than the formula of his thought, more than the annotation of his march toward Progress! Enormity become norm, absorbed by every one, he would truly be the multiplier of progress!

This future, as you see, will be materialistic. Always full of Number and Harmony, these poems would be made to last. As a matter of fact it will still be Greek poetry in a way.

This eternal art will have its functions since poets are citizens. Poetry will no longer accompany action but will lead it.

These poets are going to exist! When the infinite servitude of woman shall have ended, when she will be able to live by and for herself; then, man—hitherto abominable—having given her her freedom, she too will be a poet. Woman will discover the unknown. Will her world be different from ours? She will discover strange, unfathomable things, repulsive, delicious. We shall take them, we shall understand them.

Meantime ask the poet for the new—ideas and forms. All the bright boys will imagine they have satisfied this demand: it isn’t that at all!

The first Romantics were visionaries without quite realizing it: the cultivation of their souls began accidently: abandoned locomotives, still burning, that go on running along the rails for awhile. Lamartine is at times a visionary, but strangled by the old form. Hugo, too much of a ham, has really vision in his last works: Les Misérables is a true poem. I have Les Chatiments at hand; Stella shows the limit of Hugo’s visionary powers. Too much Belmontet and Lamennais, too many Jehovahs and columns, old, dead enormities.

Musset is fourteen times execrable for us, suffering generations carried away by visions—to whom his angel’s sloth is an insult! Oh! the insipid Tales and Proverbs! O the Nights! O Rolla, O Namouna! O the Chalice! It’s all so French, that is, detestable to the last degree; French, not Parisian! Again the work of the evil genius that inspired Rabelais, Voltaire, Jean La Fontaine with commentary by Mr. Taine! Spring-like, de Musset’s wit! Charming, his love! Regular enamel painting, solid poetry! French poetry will long be enjoyed—but in France. Every grocer-boy can reel off a Rollaesque apostrophe, every budding priest has the five hundred rhymes hidden away in a secret notebook. At fifteen these flights of passion make boys ruttish; at sixteen they are already satisfied to recite them with feeling; at eighteen, even seventeen, every schoolboy who has the chance, acts like Rolla, writes a Rolla! Perhaps some may still even die of it. Musset achieved nothing. There were visions behind the gauze curtains; he closed his eyes. Dragged from café to school-room, French and driveling, the fine corpse is dead, and from now on, let’s not even take the trouble to wake him with our execrations!

The second Romantics are really visionaries: Théophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville. But, inspecting the invisible and hearing the unheard being entirely different from recapturing the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first visionary, king of poets, a real God! Unfortunately he lived in too artistic a milieu; and his much vaunted style is trivial. Inventions of the unknown demand new forms.

Trained in the old forms: among the simpletons, A. Renaud,—has done his Rolla; L. Grandet,—has done his Rolla; the Gaulois and the Mussets, Lafenestre, Coran, C.-L. Popelin, Soulary, Salles; the schoolboys, Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles, Antran, Barbier, Pichat, Lemoyne; the Deschamps, the des Essarts; the Bohemians; the women; the talents, Leon Dierx and Sully Prudhomme, Coppée.—The new school, called Parnassian, has two visionaries, Albert Merat and Paul Verlaine, a true poet. And there you are.

So I am working to make myself a visionary.

—And now let us close with a pious chant.

Poem enclosed, Squattings (Accroupissements).

You will be damnable if you don’t answer: quickly, for in a week I shall be in Paris perhaps.

Goodbye.

A . Rimbaud

*Rimbaud’s poem, Les Effarés (The Waifs), describing haggard street urchins gazing through a cellar vent at bread in a baker’s oven.

**These two poems have not been found.

ILLUMINATIONS

APRÈS LE DÉLUGE

AUSSITÔT que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise,

Un lièvre s’arrêta dans les sainfoins et les clochettes mouvantes, et dit sa prière à l’arc-en-ciel, à travers la toile de l’araignée.

Oh! les pierres précieuses qui se cachaient,—les fleurs qui regardaient déjà.

Dans la grande rue sale, les étals se dressèrent, et l’on tira les barques vers la mer étagée là-haut comme sur les gravures.

Le sang coula, chez Barbe-Bleue,—aux abattoirs, dans les cirques, où le sceau de Dieu blêmit les fenêtres. Le sang et le lait coulèrent.

Les castors bâtirent. Les “mazagrans” fumèrent dans les estaminets.

Dans la grande maison de vitres encore ruisselante, les enfants en deuil regardèrent les merveilleuses images.

Une porte claqua; et, sur la place du hameau, l’enfant tourna ses bras, compris des girouettes et des coqs des clochers de partout, sous l’éclatante giboulée.

Madame *** établit un piano dans les Alpes.