(Rimbaud, Graham Robb)
Rimbaud's sermon of 15 May 1871 is commonly referred to as the Lettre du voyant ('Letter of the Seer'). On a first reading, it hardly seems to deserve such a grand title. 'Letter of the Excited Schoolboy' would give a more accurate impression of the torrential arguments and half-digested readings - alchemists, socialists, psychologists and mechanistic philosophers.
1. The true poet is a 'seer', but a seer who creates new realities and becomes the pioneer of a new race. For this, a special training programme is required.
The first study of the man who wishes to be a poet is complete knowledge of himself. He searches his mind, inspects it, tries it out and learns to use it. As soon as he knows his mind, he must cultivate it.
'Cultivation' was to consist of tinkering with the mind as God created it, 'to make the soul monstrous': 'Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.' To the notion of a 'derangement of all the senses', he now added the crucial adjective: 'raisonne' ('reasoned' or 'rational'). This was not to be a simple hallucinogenic stupor. It was a scientific experiment. Drugs would certainly play a role in the process of sensory derailment, but not yet. Charleville had no opium dens, and hashish, though legal, was a rare commodity.
2. The poet-seer will create a new 'universal language'.
This language will be soul for soul's sake, summing up everything, perumes, sounds and colours, thought latching on to thought and pulling.
Though it sounds like aesthetics-fiction, this is actually a workable desciption of the idiom Rimbaud was already developing - the merging of the different senses, images
spiralling off other images instead of referring back to the controlling ‘I’: a poetic
equivalent of the Copernican revolution.
3. The new age will be an age of unbridled
intelligence, reminiscent of a socialist utopia.
These poets will be! When the endless servitude of woman is broken, when she lives for and by herself, man -- who until now has been abominable -- will release her from her duties and she too will be a poet! She will find the unknown! Will her worlds of thought differ from our own? She will discover strange, unfathomable, repulsive and delicious things. We will take them and understand them.
4. To emphasize the novelty of his scheme,
Rimbaud ended with a high-speed, 600-word history of poetry from antiquaty to the
present. It was a tale of stupidity, sloth and accidental insight. Since the end of the Golden Age, poetry had been nothing but ‘rhymed prose, a game, the corpulence and glory of countless idiotic generations’. A complete waste of effort.
But since inspecting the invisible and listening to the unheard-of is something other than reviving the spirit of dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer, the king of poets, a real God. Even then, the milieu in which he lived was too arty; and the form that is supposed to be his finest is stingy. Inventing the unknown calls for new forms.
The history ended with a scrapyard of second-rate poets. Rimbaud divided all the
Parnassians into mock categories: ‘innocents’, ‘school-boys’, ‘dead men and imbeciles’,
‘journalists’, ‘Bohemians’, etc. Only two were classified as ‘seers’ - a forgotten Parnassian called Albert Mérat and Paul Verlaine, ‘a true poet’.
Rimbaud's willingness to take his own mind seriously should not be underestimated. He was still trying to resolve the dilemma he had raised in the Ophelia poem: to enter the 'unknown', the poet had to divest himself of personal identity; but without that identity, how could the visions be comprehended? How could 'derangement' be reconciled with 'reason'?
The main points appear to be these:
The first Romantics were swine to their own pearls: ‘seers without really noticing’.
The Parnassians had tried to galvanize the ancient corpse of Greek poetry, while Victor
Hugo, despite being ‘pig-headed’, had glimpsed ‘the unknown’ in his visionary poems and
in Les Misérables....
For all its insults, the Lettre du voyant is a gripping piece of literary criticism, a curiously plausible attempt to reconcile the two antagonistic trends of nineteenth-century poetry: the 'bourgeois' belief in endless technological progress and the spiritual aspirations of the Romantics. For Baudelaire, poetry had been a source of consoling illusions. For Rimbaud, these shimmering illusions would one day solidify into social fact. Poetry would no longer simply keep step with reality: 'it will precede it'....
If there was any insincerity in the letter, it lay in the humdrum details. He signed off with a hint that he was about to go and join his brother anarchists in Paris. But since the perimeter defences had been breached by a vindictive government army and since the Commune was obviously doomed, this may simply have been a ruse to extract a swift response from Demeny.
