arthur rimbaud poetry analysis essays

(This is roughly speaking a translation, from the original French, of a talk given at Peyresq, in the Alpes de Haute Provence, France, in July 2005, to the Société d'Etudes Benjamin Fondane. The translations of Rimbaud's and Bonnefoy's poems are mine.) To start speaking of what Rimbaud has meant for the poet Yves Bonnefoy —and a start is all we can hope for in this short time— let us try to go directly toward what is essential: let us re-read one of the texts in the Illuminations, the one titled, simply, Conte : Story A Prince was annoyed at never having applied himself to anything other than to perfecting ordinary generosities. He foresaw amazing revolutions in love, and suspected his women of being capable of something better than a consent spiced with heaven and luxury. He wanted to see Truth, the moment of essential desire and of essential satisfaction. Whether or not this was a pious aberration of his, he wanted. He possesed, at least, a good measure of human power. All the women he had known were slaughtered. What havoc in the garden of beauty! Beneath the saber, they blessed him. He did not order new ones provided. —The women reappeared. He killed all his followers, after the hunt or the carouse.—Still, all followed him. He amused himself in cutting the throat of his pet animals. He had his palaces burnt down. Hurling himself on the people, he hewed them down to pieces.—The people, the golden roofs, the beautiful animals kept on existing. Thus can man achieve ecstasy in destruction and become younger by cruelty. The people did not complain. Nobody offered an opinion. One evening he was galloping proudly. A Genie appeared, of a beauty ineffable, even unavowable. His face and his demeanor held the promise of a multiple and complex love. Of a happiness unutterable, even unbearable. The Prince and the Genie annihilated each other, probably in their essential.
The famous photograph by Étienne Carjat, taken in December 1871. A grainy image, the contrast between the black and white simplifies the face, posterizes it, popifies it. It is a portrait that almost begs for the Andy Warhol or the Roy Lichtenstein treatment. The poet is 17 years old. He wears a dandy’s cravat and a shabby suit. His expression—with its insolent pout and vacant, sociopathic stare—cannot obscure the feminine delicacy of his nose and the soft curve of his boyish cheeks. No one who meets Rimbaud during this period fails to mention his cherubic face, which enters posterity through this image. This is the face of the original enfant terrible, the face that will hypnotize Jim Morrison and Patti Smith into poetry, the face heartthrobs Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Whitshaw will be hired to resemble in Total Eclipse and I’m Not There. But by framing the shot around the head and shoulders, Carjat hides from the viewer the freakishly adult body beneath: all six feet of it, lanky, with ruddy skin, terminating in a pair of monstrous hands. The choice is deliberate. Carjat’s photographs are every bit as caricatured as his satirical drawings for the feuilletons; he is not so much interested in capturing the poet’s likeness as creating his myth, and to create a myth requires excision just surely as it does embellishment. To the same end, Henri Fantin-Latour’s 1872 group portrait Un Coin de Table only gives us a half-length Rimbaud. Second from the left in the portrait, Rimbaud is sitting down. Once again he stares off into the distance; his cheek rests dreamily on the heel of his palm, in an obvious reference to the cherub in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Angelic as it was, the face of the real Rimbaud was just up the neck from the body of a farmer; though boyish, it was attached to the body of a man. At 17, less than a year before he writes the first of the Illuminations.
Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry is a mystery that continues to haunt his fans. Credit Illustration by ANDRÉ CARRILHO On a winter day in 1883, aboard a steamer that was returning him from Marseilles to the Arabian port city of Aden, a French coffee trader named Alfred Bardey struck up a conversation with a countryman he’d met on board, a young journalist named Paul Bourde. As Bardey chatted about his trading operation, which was based in Aden, he happened to mention the name of one of his employees—a “tall, pleasant young man who speaks little,” as he later described him. To his surprise, Bourde reacted to the name with amazement. This wasn’t so much because, by a bizarre coincidence, he had gone to school with the employee; it was, rather, that, like many Frenchmen who kept up with contemporary literature, he had assumed that the young man was dead. To an astonished Bardey, Bourde explained that, twelve years earlier, his taciturn employee had made a “stupefying and precocious” literary début in Paris, only to disappear soon after. Until that moment, for all Bardey or anyone else in his circle knew, this man was simply a clever trader who kept neat books. Today, many think of him as a founder of modern European poetry. His name was Arthur Rimbaud. What Bardey learned about Rimbaud that day is still what most people know about Rimbaud. There was, on the one hand, the dazzling, remarkably short-lived career: all of Rimbaud’s significant works were most likely composed between 1870, when he was not quite sixteen, and 1874, when he turned twenty. On the other hand, there was the abrupt abandonment of literature in favor of a vagabond life that eventually took him to Aden and then to East Africa, where he remained until just before his death, trading coffee, feathers, and, finally, guns, and making a tidy bundle in the process. The great mystery that continues to haunt.
For the song cycle by Benjamin Britten, see Les Illuminations (Britten). Illuminations is an incompleted suite of prose poems by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, first published partially in La Vogue, a Paris literary review, in May–June 1886. The texts were reprinted in book form in October 1886 by Les publications de La Vogue under the title Les Illuminations proposed by the poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's assumed former lover. In his preface, Verlaine explained that the title was based on the English word illuminations, in the sense of coloured plates, and a sub-title that Rimbaud had already given the work. Verlaine dated its composition between 1873 and 1875.[1] Rimbaud wrote the majority of poems comprising Illuminations during his stay in the United Kingdom with Verlaine at his side. The texts follow Rimbaud's peregrinations in 1873 from Reading where he had hoped to find steady work, to Charleville and Stuttgart in 1875.[2] Contents 1 Content, style, and themes 2 Writing Les Illuminations 3 Publication and critical response 4 Translations 5 Influence and legacy 6 References 7 External links Content, style, and themes[edit] The text of Illuminations is generally agreed to consist of forty-two poems.[3] In large part, due to the circumstances surrounding the publication of the poems of Illuminations, there is no consensus as to the order in which Rimbaud intended the poems to appear. Nevertheless, certain conventions stand among the many editions of the text. For example, the various publications of Illuminations almost invariably begin with Après Le Deluge.[4] Despite this ostensible controversy, a large number of scholars have declared the order of Illuminations to be irrelevant. Perhaps translator Bertrand Mathieu best distilled the major reasons for this contention: No single poem really depends on the others or counts on them to achieve its own perfections.