Where to even fucking start with Arthur Rimbaud. I remember my french literature class’ room being filled with posters of him, staring deep into his face as if he could tell my inner rebel teenage-self to write it out in the least comprehensive way possible.
Rimbaud was everywhere growing up, not just a figure, but an icon, a dream of who to become as a writer. He is undefinable. He is a myth. He stood above every literary figure as the original rebel, and today, we’re going to explain to you why.
For this article I partnered with one of my best friends who spent the past 6 months studying Rimbaud and immersing herself into every single comma he ever wrote. With this in mind, let’s discover who one of the greatest poet to ever live was.
Arthur Rimbaud was a 19th century poet who started writing at 15 and stopped at 21. Yes, he retired when most people start writing. Icon behavior. He is one of the only writing figures we have from whom we have published writing from this age.
Do you remember how you were as a young adult? You wanted to set the world on fire, do 150 on a motorbike without a helmet, scream as you jump from a cliff and onto the sea. Well, Rimbaud wanted to write it out, and boy oh boy, he fucking did. He was turbulent, insolent, and looking to deconstruct what has already been created. Yes he was a poet, but no poet like him has existed before, and none have managed to replicate him since (the dadaists and surrealists have tried but to no avail). Needless to say, our little Rimbaud had a massive ego to boot his talent, because he knew he had talent, and when you’re 16 and talented, you’re basically Kanye West off his meds on Twitter.
Rimbaud as an author was a complex and unique figure. Probably suffering from undiagnosed mental health issues considering he couldn’t keep relationships long, and he had an addiction to alcohol. He was mesmerizing when he wrote; he shone like a shooting star, but just like a shooting star, he went too soon, dying in his thirties after retiring from writing in his early twenties.
He would reinvent himself through poetry, the variety of his poems and of his skillset on full display in his short, but dense work, but one thing didn’t change: his politics. He stood against the bourgeoisie, the Parisian literary salons, Napoleon the Third, and instead stood in favor of democracy. He thought the second empire was an alienation, and his elogy of ancient Greece for example was a way of showing his longing for democracy (yes democracy in ancient Greece wasn’t perfect but still).
Rimbaud, as a figure is a lot like David Lynch. He has a cult following of devoted fans who do not understand his work. His work his mostly meant to be read and accepted rather than interpreted and turned into video essays. Lynch famously refused to explain his films (
has a great article on David Lynch check it out here) and had Rimbaud been alive to explain his poems, his answers would have been the same.‘Would you elaborate on that?’
‘No.’
But is the idea of the disinterest poet a myth? His lack of readability is often considered mystifying.
I. Provocation and Dissidence
Coming from the countryside and lost in the sea of the Parisian cultural world, which at the time was the meca of culture, with his massive teenage ego, he would constantly criticize the writers he would meet and did not care about his readers. He did not write to be read; he wrote to express something he felt deep inside with metaphors only he understood, for only he would hold the key to the meaning of his words because he did not want his readers to know. He was bashful and boasting in public about his talent, but deep inside, he was a bit private wasn’t he?
“J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage”
He never found his footing in the Parisian scene, alienated by the late romanticism of Baudelaire’s Spleen (more on that later), he thought the Parisian and European scene’s values were superficial and dated.
He was constantly traveling through Europe, London, Belgium, Greece, before retiring to Africa, always seeking something that seemed forever out of reach for him: happiness, contentment, fulfillment. He did not find his place in his own countryside because he wasn’t religious, and very gay, things people in the countryside of France in the 19th century did not necessarily vibe with.
“Je suis esclave de mon baptême”
He would reject all the established dogma, including the literary world which had no spirit after Victor Hugo, Balzac and Baudelaire took their last breath. The literary world was clinging to the hinges with bleeding fingernails to the gone era of Romanticism so much that Rimbaud called them ‘les assis’ (the seated). Les assis were a group of literary people who would hold the same principles as that of a century long gone, and refused to face the reality of the current world. He called them les assis because these people sat in their comfort; they had vines crawling around their legs that would render them unable to stand up and face the world.
Rimbaud rejected comfort and rejected love because he saw love as a form of comfort which would turn him into one of those assis: a bad artist.
For example, there’s a poem of love in which a man confesses his love for a woman, it’s beautiful and long, and yet, by the end, the woman brings the man’s romanticism back to earth by asking him ‘and my desk?’
Arthur (yes we’re on a first name basis now) refused to be happy and would often talk about his negative feelings, like most poets do, sure, but he was obsessed with it.
“Le mal à été mon dieu. Je me suis allongé dans la boue, je me suis séché à l’air du crime.”
Not only was he obsessed with negativity, but he was also more of an introspective poet than an extraverted one. Most poets, especially modern ones, write their feelings plainly in a way everyone can relate to and understand. Rimbaud, on the other hand, would write his feelings in such a complex and nuance way, filled with allegories and metaphors that only he understood the intricacies of what he had written.
Nontheless, he would explore his soul through his poems in a chaste way, but he treated his soul like a laboratory, words being his experiment. That’s why he wrote ‘je est un autre’ a big fuck of the ‘I’ of the romantics. He thought it boring to explore the soul with introspection, that’s why he treated himself with little empathy, in an attempt to explore the worst of humanity.
II. The challenge of interpretation as freedom for the reader
Since he rejected all that is subjective and romantic, Rimbaud would allow the reader to make his own meaning out of his words. Everyone has a different meaning of his poems, yet, he speaks to us all, undefinable, unknowable, yet, crystal clear to the clairvoyant.
Since his work was published post-moterm and did not receive any praise during his life, we can only play guessing games as to what he means.
“C’est faux de dire je pense, on devrait dire on me pense. Je est un autre.”
He didn’t care about the interpretation of his texts, which in a way, frees the reader and allows anyone to determine their own meaning, getting what they want from the words they’re reading. (I remember having to write a dissertation in high school to one of his poems and it was an awful time).
Some critics see a Christian interpretation to his oeuvre, others see Illuminations as a metaphysical awakening, something prophetic, some see a subversive teenagers; and a few see the birth of surrealism. No one agrees on anything and there isn’t a right or wrong way to read Rimbaud, you read each poem, you get inside them, think of them, and let yourself interpret it, it’ll reveal more about you than it does about the author anyway.
On the other hand, it’s ironic because Rimbaud hated the interpretation and dissection of poetry. That’s why he stopped writing in verse and came back to prose because there was a more serendipitous element to the poetry that way. He hated the fact that we’ll try to interpret poetry because he has the key we’re desperately looking for, and yet we don’t even know where the keyhole is to begin with.
He wanted to put distance between himself and his reader, leaving his reader with a nondescriptive first draft of raw emotion metaphored in nuanced ways, for the reader to extract their own meaning. To find meaning in poetry is to translate your own thoughts and your own state of mind.
“Some write to be understood, I write to maintain a distance” - Nietzsche (my own translation because I couldn’t find the quote in english).
III. The confused writer, a prophetic poet or a con artist?
As a teen, Rimbaud was running after himself, like a train he couldn’t quite catch at the last minute. Through literature, he was discovering himself through his own words, like a diary, he was in a constant existential crisis. He was looking for a place in a world he rejected but loved (the poetry world) and thought mundane life was an abomination.
His existential crisis was in direct correlation to the cultural spleen of the end of the romanticism era. There were two romanticism: the romanticism of Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) which was full of hope against the backdrop of societal changes. The second one was lead by Baudelaire and his notion of the Spleen, taken from Edgar Allan Poe, which is about the general exhaustion everyone felt.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud’s model, used to write for art, but Rimbaud instead offers to write soul for soul.
His political period was unstable with the Prussian War under the rule of Napoleon the III. Rimbaud was in the Commune, a group of people against the second empire, looking to unravel Paris. He thought this period was nothing but a nightmare. He wouldn’t like it now either, I’m guessing.
He would make his experience objective, hidden behind vocabulary. All that is personal disappears behind randomly chosen words that made sense only to him.
As a teen, he knew how to excite the brains of the Parisian scene, even though they didn’t understand anything he was writing, but it was well-written, and he was a teenager, so naturally, everyone was impressed. Maybe he was playing with the creation of a myth without making any meaning with his words, and then he left the salons without publishing anything.
He’s a little bit like Andy Warhol too if you think about it, who knew the artistic world had become more about pretending than being. It was more of a social status than a personal passion. It’s as if an artist would put a projection of a Banana (Andy Warhol Velvet Underground style) during an art show and rich people would clap, as if they knew what the banana was about, and if you didn’t, then you’re not only left out of the joke, but you’re just plain dumb. That’s what Rimbaud and Warhol understood about the art world. The less sense it makes, the more celebrated you are. Look at Dali, why the fuck are there so many ants and eggs?
Obviously, his social capital was boosted by the incomprehensibility of his work after his death, but while he was alive, he was known in the salons as a menace to society (he was mean boohoo to the forty years old men being bullied by a teenager and someone decided to take him into a duel) but no one else knew about him.
He doesn’t want literature to have a meaning because he considers that knowingly making an oeuvre with meaning is a sort of prostitution of the art.
At some point, he even wanted to burn his own poetry because he wanted to grieve his artistic life and move on. You have to understand that Rimbaud wrote from age 15 to 21 and then retired, before dying in his thirties. He stopped writing because felt disillusioned by the literary world that wouldn’t accept him when he did not even want to be accepted by them.
He was pretentious and provocative, and wanted to show a new vision of poetry to those who were installed in this Parisian salon for longer than him. He was always confrontational, and if he had to insult someone, he would do it with panache.
Poetry in itself is not the explanation; it’s brief. Everything is implicit, it’s not literature you read to understand, it’s something you read because you’re inquisitive, and need a new way of approaching wording. In poetry, the writer disappears because either he becomes an allegory with which the reader will identify, or an incomprehensible model. It’s something more concrete yet completely obtuse because it’ shorter, and the writer needs to be immersive; they need to return to reality to explore new things.
Poetry is an infinite research. The final goal is not to understand, but the work towards understanding. Poetry is probably the entre-deux between the reader and the writer. If we go to the next line, the blank space is left so the reader can complete it themselves.
Everybody has a Rimbaud in their head, everyone has a different meaning to Rimbaud. We all create meaning for him and to his work, so he becomes the reflection of the reader, and we might understand ourselves better.
So why is Rimbaud a genius? Because we will never understand him.
I wrote this piece with one of my best friends in quite an original way. I’ve read everything Rimbaud (the subject of this piece) has written, but I haven’t dived into analysis as deeply as her, so for this article, she was doing a lecture for an audience of one in French, and I was transcribing everything into English as we went.
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I’m not a huge reader and while I’ve heard of Rambaud I wasn’t aware of his significance, I appreciate the digestible lesson and will be sure to check out his work!
LOVE LOVE LOVE