Rimbaud's Influence in the 21st Century

Reflections on My Changing Opinion and Attitude Towards a Brilliantly Precocious 19th Century French Poet

by James Albert Barr

"The body of the poet
  The thought was long.
  The flowers were here and now they're gone...
  Where are we now with this life we are imitating?
  The poet is the killer... and that... we are now betraying."
            - The Murder Poet by Chris Barr from his 2024 poetry collection, Hauntological Echoes 

I haven’t read Henry Miller's “The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud'' in several years. It’s been really great to pick it up again and reacquaint myself with Miller’s rhapsodic, thoroughly engrossing, if characteristically, defiantly immature, prose, whatever the seeming eschatological implications therein. I consider it one of the “books of my life” (to quote another Miller book title, and sentiment, in general), but, admittedly, a book predominantly a product – but a highly valued product nonetheless! – of my relative youth; relative, meaning my late 20s and early 30s. I was 27 years old when I first read it at the reference library at the corner of Yonge and Bloor, in Toronto, back in the summer of 1995. If memory serves, I think my brother Jeff eventually bought a precious copy of it for me for Christmas in 1997, and I’ve had it in my possession ever since. In conjunction with my rereading of Miller’s personal celebration of the life and work of 19th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud (and its connection with his own life), I also dusted off my well-worn copy of Rimbaud’s complete works (the Paul Schmidt translation) and read many of the poems contained inside, poems that I had read over and over since I first procured that copy back in 1994 and all through the rest of that final decade of the 20th century. Rimbaud was absolutely unsurpassed in my eyes, mind and heart back then when it came to comparing him with other poets. But a “sea change” had taken place in my constitution around, or shortly after, the turn of the millennium, in terms of how I perceived Rimbaud as compared to other poets, namely T.S. Eliot and Stephane Mallarme, and to a lesser degree even Rainer Maria Rilke (who, in fact, was nearly on the same level as Rimbaud during the 90s, in my estimation).  To this day, however, those four master poets still gloriously represent my own personal “Mount Rushmore of poetry”, with a second-tier of great poets in my life being: Valery, Keats, Yeats and Baudelaire. Shakespeare, of course, is obviously monumental for me as well, but I mostly associate him as a dramatist, though he was, unquestionably, an incredible poet, in the strictest sense, too. Still, it’s his “Hamlet” that sticks out most conspicuously and nearly exclusively, in terms of works that have profoundly altered me in some magical way; although there’s also “Macbeth” to consider, as it was my first Shakespeare play I ever read, but still. Getting back to Rimbaud, whom I hadn’t been nearly as preoccupied with over the last couple of decades as I was in the 90s, I realize why he is no longer “my poet”, and hasn’t been for awhile: his immaturity and adolescent-driven, unrealistic, if understandable in his context, demands of society and life, in general. Rimbaud is truly the “poet of youth” and inexperience (at least in the outset of his poetic journey), despite his claim to the contrary. He was verily a young, precociously brilliant Young Turk of a poet who insatiably hungered for the endless and inexhaustible banquet of life and experience “where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed”. He wanted, nay demanded, the secrets of life and the universe, his appetite knew no bounds or restraints. He was truly the “enfant terrible” and the damned voyou, “the great criminal, the great accursed – and the Supreme Scientist!”, or so that was the adolescently-inspired plan anyway. Through his prescribed “derangement of all the senses” he chased after drunken visions beheld in boundless and hitherto unseen realms (“I’ve seen what others have only dreamed they saw!”) in order to ultimately attain the “unknown”, and perhaps “forbidden knowledge”, but at a great personal cost, both mentally and emotionally, and even physically. The result was some of the greatest and feverishly unrestrained poetry ever written, and an inauguration of the truly modern and symbolist, as well as being a precursor to 20th century surrealism, and an inspiration for the modernists. Rimbaud’s accomplishments are still deserving of a great sense of awe and admiration, no doubt. At their best they still provide a system for unbridled experimenting and Dionysian expression for the young and hungry in life, basically for the impetuosity and impatience so traditionally prevalent in youth, but at their worst they represent a completely unbalanced and undisciplined, even implacable, and certainly dangerous (but that’s what makes it so attractive and tempting, right?), program of potential self-destruction and inevitable disappointment, for after all, didn’t Rimbaud ultimately fail in his Faustian quest for knowledge and experience to achieve what he set out to attempt? And, yes, as he mentions in his famous “Seer letters” of May 1871, if by this so-called “systematized” engagement of the “derangement of all the senses…he attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnamable: other horrible workers will come, they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!” Spoken like a true exponent of unbridled and irrational youth, though a fantastically exceptional one, of course. All youths, even the unassuming and shy ones, have egocentric inner flights of grandiosity and outlandish wishes and desires. It’s quite normal, but Rimbaud took them to places hitherto unheard of for a youth of his gifted and precocious persuasion back in the late 19th century, when God was losing his grip on his alleged creation, and Nietzsche was soon to proclaim that “God is dead!” via Zarathustra, and that the demythologization of history’s, or certainly Western man’s, ages-old systems of belief were crumbling and modern man was hitting his stride scientifically and materially, as he became more and more an ardent adherent of the capitalist system and free-enterprise; the once predominate internal life was abandoned for an external one, which, ironically shunned nature for artificial material goods and property, as did the former  in the name of God’s will, the saved soul, and world-transcending grace and salvation. The thing is, not nearly enough of the new generational “horrible workers” that followed were of the intellectual and artistic brilliance that Rimbaud was, and the tragic results were likely many, I’m sure, as Rimbaud’s work became much more read and known in the 20th century, particularly with the young, and restless… and reckless. The one that comes to mind immediately, of course, is the tragic case of River Phoenix, who, when he discovered Rimbaud, through his reading of Miller’s “The Time of the Assassins” (in initial preparation for his unrealized role as Rimbaud in what eventually became 1995’s “Total Eclipse” film, and ultimately starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud, in River's stead), was so enthralled by Rimbaud (and probably Miller’s very impressionable and provocative prose no less) that he, himself, decided to initiate his own “derangement of all the senses”, and got himself killed, at only age 23, because of it, I don’t doubt one little bit. I could also name Jim Morrison among those tragic “horrible workers” who were so thirsty for visions and cultural-revolution too, whatever the ill-advised measures taken for their own sake. And he was only 27 when he died!

What Phoenix and Morrison both failed to realize (and I think even to a certain, ironic degree Henry Miller himself, at least in his, still, youth-inspired and romantic idealism at age 55 when he wrote his “Rimbaud book”, and inspired many more youths besides Phoenix), before it was too late for them, was that Rimbaud had abandoned his poetic mission when he was just 20 years old! After he finally realized the futility of his goal (which was chronicled in his celebrated, but grossly misunderstood “A Season in Hell”); that he could NOT, in fact, break into heaven through the back-door, and bestow, wholesale, the grand, magnificent visions of his drunken, phantasmagoric voyages before all of humanity (because, after all, it was all or nothing with Rimbaud!). He rejected literature and retreated, out of necessity, from society completely, by ensconcing himself in the jungles, rivers and deserts of Africa, sojourning in Abyssinia and Harar, for instance, before the arduous, physical demands on himself resulted in his losing a leg to cancer and shortly thereafter, at age 37 in 1891, dying in abject agony while in the apparent midst of feverish visions returning from his youth as a poet, while his sister Isabelle tried to get him to repent and accept God, in order to “save his soul”, on his death bed.

What, in the end, is the ultimate lesson learned here through one’s reading of not only Rimbaud’s poetry, but biography as well? I feel that it’s a lesson infused as a “cautionary tale” of what NOT to do lest one put his/her life in potential peril, and not just mortally, but perhaps more immediately, mentally and emotionally, even spiritually, without any direct connection with religion, that is. It’s also crucially important to obtain a “historical context” of the age that produced the likes of a Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wagner, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Zola, Whitman, Emerson, Manet, Van Gogh, Darwin, Blavatsky, Strindberg, Ibsen, Beardsley, Tesla and, of course, Mallarme. This is what I gradually did over the last 20 years or so, and it has ultimately rewarded me with a vaster understanding of these great historical figures and their respective times and contributions to humanity. Coupled with these heroic 19th century examples and the ones I discovered and absorbed from the 20th century, I feel I’ve been able to, for the most part, achieve a “constitutional balance” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian tendencies of the artist and thinker. Through my myriad readings of poets and philosophers, not only through the 19th and 20th centuries, but basically through over two thousand years worth of great artists’ and thinkers’ work, I’ve applied my investigational system I call the “4 C’s Approach” and thus have “collected and connected, calculated and corrected” to the best of my abilities, leading me up to the present point of my own personal journey of attaining knowledge and expressing myself artistically, a fairly broad and well-scoped understanding of the world-view via Western history, predominantly, as well as that of the Orient, though I have still much to learn. All this despite Oswald Spengler’s conclusion (made about a hundred years ago now and counting) that the West is in decline, and that modern life is merely a Faustian Civilization, as opposed to an Apollonian Culture, which means that all the arts have been exhausted (painting, for instance, peaked in the 17th century!), religion has been superseded (to the, apparent, detriment of our world, for better or worse), and we are now purgatorial wanderers/zombies of the money-system and the "cult of the science". According to Spengler, there’s nothing a person like me, and my ilk, could possibly do to prevent this inevitable and unavoidable decline. The implication in Spengler’s amazingly rich and informative, if dour, book is that we contemporary beings are, for the most part, if even subtly, aware of this inevitability, but we stubbornly forge onward hoping for a “stay of execution” kind of panacea, or rather placebo even. I mean, what the hell else are we going to do, besides bury ourselves in mindless, and effectively distracting, activities like cyber-spatial/gaming/social media immersion, celebrity obsession, needless shopping (on-line or otherwise), fashion following, identity politics, hedonism, etc, like the majority of people appear to be helplessly mired in? All I can say for now is “stay tuned”, ironically enough, and see what happens.