Rimbaud, Jean Arthur (EN)

Rimbaud Jean Nicolas Arthur, born 20 October 1854 in Charleville (Ardennes), died 10 November 1891 in Marseille, French poet and traveler. Rimbaud’s childhood was marked by rebellion against his mother’s authoritarian nature and petty bourgeois environment, which manifested itself in numerous runaways from home. In the spring of 1871, he became ideologically involved with the Paris Commune, although his direct participation in the revolt has not been confirmed; his early poetic talent resulted in his first mature poems (including Parisian War Song, The Hands of Mary-Jane, Paris is Repeopled). In the same year, he met P. Verlaine; their relationship, full of dramatic breakups and reunions as well as joint trips, including to Brussels and London, ended in July 1873 when Verlaine fired a shot at Rimbaud, wounding him. It was during this time that Rimbaud wrote his most famous prose poem, A Season in Hell, a kind of diary of his spiritual struggles and failures, a passionate attack on European society, an expression of despair and inner turmoil. After a period of extensive travels (including service with the Foreign Legion in Java), in 1880 Rimbaud departed for Harar (Ethiopia). He spent the following years trading in coffee, ivory, incense, and musk, and undertaking expeditions into the interior of Africa. His accounts of his African journeys were published by the Société de Géographie in Paris, as well as in “Les Temps” and “Le Figaro”. In 1885, he became involved in supervising an weapons transport for King Menelik and in 1888 he founded his own trading company. In 1891, a serious illness forced him to return to Marseille. He died at the age of 37. 

Rimbaud’s astonishingly early poetic maturity and his early silence (around 1875) contributed to the creation of the legend of a 17-year-old genius who, breaking with the aesthetics of the Parnassians, opened a new era of French poetry. He contained his poetic manifesto in two letters from 1871: to G. Izambard and P. Demeny (the latter seems almost addressed to the Surrealists); they discuss a new concept of poetry, consisting in transcending the limitations of one’s own personality, the postulate of purifying perception and consciousness of all conventions, and the requirement of complete self-knowledge. Poetry is to be a form of cognition – on the one hand, akin to mystical insight (though far removed from Christianity), and on the other, one that discovers new realms through the “dispersion of all the senses,” hallucinations, and narcotic intoxication. The formula “I is another” can therefore be understood as an expression of complete liberation from oneself and immersion in universal consciousness. The poet should become a clairvoyant, a visionary (Voyant), who serves humanity on the path of “multiplying progress,” and “the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown!”

Rimbaud’s poetic style is characterized by unprecedented dynamism, “the unstoppable rush of gigantic images” (J. Iwaszkiewicz) – as in the famous poem The Drunken Boat, the rejection of perfect rhyme in favor of slant rhyme, inspired by folk poetry. The innovation of his poetry lies in the deliberate lack of coherence of images, in numerous breaks in structure, unexpected combinations of words, clusters of consonances, and surprising metaphors. Rimbaud’s language, often brutal and provocative, assimilates, on the one hand, elements of common speech and vocabulary associated with modern technical civilization, and on the other, Latinisms – a remnant of the period of Latin poems published in the school magazine “Monitor”. The range of poetic forms used by Rimbaud extends from sonnets to free verse and blank verse, as well as prose. Illuminations is a collection of short prose works in which the poet engages in a free play of associations and meanings, saturating them with images and visions of a hallucinatory atmosphere often considered untranslatable. Reading them in 1886 was a revelation for P. Claudel, who owed his conversion to them, seeing in Rimbaud “a mystic in a wild state” («un mystique à l’état sauvage»). However, Rimbaud’s influence was felt primarily by the generation of Dadaists, Surrealists, and Cubists. He was ahead of G. Apollinaire and L. Aragon, and according to E. Pound, he was also important for the development of English-language poetry. In Poland, Rimbaud influenced J. Iwaszkiewicz, J. Tuwim, W. Broniewski, A. Ważyk, K.I. Gałczyński, to name a few.

Rimbaud was not particularly interested in music. Biographers note that he took his first piano lessons in 1874–75 in Charleville with L. Létrange. The musical resonance of Rimbaud’s work is not particularly strong, primarily due to the predominance of prosaic structures, the lack of connection between the semantic and phonetic layers, irregular rhythm, and the type of expression: sharp, violent, and almost entirely devoid of lyrical interpolations. Among the few compositions using Rimbaud’s texts are: L. Nono’s political opera Al gran sole carico d’amore (Au grand soleil d’amour chargé – a quote from the poem The Hands of Mary-Jane), praising the Paris Commune as the prototype of modern revolutionary movements, performed in Milan in 1975; D. Milhaud’s cantata Adieu 1964 (excerpt from A Season in Hell) and W. Rihm’s Symphony No. 3, whose second movement includes a short excerpt from Départ in Illuminations, sung by the choir between quotations from texts by F. Nietzsche.

B. Britten’s 1939 cantata Les illuminations, based on excerpts from Parade, Phrases, Antiques, Royauté, Marine, Being beauteous, and Villes, is considered one of composer’s most important works. “The extraordinary simplicity of this music, its neoclassical clarity and lucidity, when juxtaposed with Rimbaud’s dazzling visions, takes on a whole new expressive meaning” (A. Tuchowski). H.W. Henze also leaned towards a lyrical interpretation in his cantata Being beauteous (1963). Rimbaud’s text, expressing beauty and the longing for death, was captured by Henze within a symmetrical structure, whose strong constructivism is also evident in the rhythmic and motivic organization. Distancing himself from the tendency to illustrate the text psychologically or symbolically, the composer created an expression rich in expressiveness and refined in color. In Sezon w piekle (A Season in Hell, 1983) by E. Synowiec, the inspiration drawn from Rimbaud’s work is manifested in the overall mood of the music as well as in its saturation of symbolism in numbers, letter-pitch correspondences, and the structuring of musical narrative, melodic shapes, dynamic and texture regulation, etc. In 1993, Volans’s chamber opera The Man with Footsoles of Wind was premiered, with a libretto by Roger Clarke inspired by the later period of Rimbaud’s life and also containing references to A Season in Hell. Reviews appeared, among others, in “Tempo” and “Opera.”

Literature: E. Delahaye Rimbaud – l`artiste et l`être moral, Paris 1923; F. Ruchon Jean-Arthur Rimbaud, sa vie, son oeuvre, son influence, Paris 1929; P. Arnoult Rimbaud, Paris 1943; R. Silvain Rimbaud le précurseur, Paris 1945; W. Fowlie Rimbaud, the myth of childhood, London 1946; J. Gengoux La symbolique de Rimbaud, Paris 1947; P. Zech Jean Arthur Rimbaud. Ein Querschnitt durch sein Leben und Werk, Berlin 1947; H. de Bouillane de Lacoste Rimbaud et le problème des Illuminations, Paris 1950; J. Gengoux La Pensé poétique de Rimbaud, Paris 1950; W. Fowlie Rimbaud’s Illuminations. A Study in Angelism, London 1953; G.-E. Clancier De Rimbaud au surréalisme, Paris 1955; Y. Bonnefoy Rimbaud par lui-même, Paris 1961; M. Eigeldinger Rimbaud et le système solaire, Neuchâtel 1964; M. Ruff Rimbaud, l`homme et l`oeuvre, Paris 1968; P. Gascar Rimbaud et la Commune, Paris 1971; J.-P. Giusto Rimbaud créateur, Lille 1980; R. Etiemble Rimbaud: système solaire ou trou noir? Paris 1984; J.-L. Cornille Rimbaud nègre de Dieu, Lille 1989; A. Tuchowski Benjamin Britten. Twórca, dzieło, epoka, Krakow 1994; Situation de Rimbaud en 1991: actes du colloque franco-polonais organisé par l’Institut de Philologie Romane et Le Centre de Civilisation Française de l’Université de Varsovie ; Varsovie avril 1991, Warsaw 1995; L. Sokół Dwa „Sezony w piekle”: Rimbaud i Strindberg, «Res Facta Nova» 3 (12), 1999; R. Kurylak „Sezon w piekle” wg Rimbaud Ewy Synowiec. Technologia i symbolika, Master’s thesis, Satnisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk, 2001; P. Michon Rimbaud syn, trans. W. Gilewski, Warsaw 2004; K. Wojtynek-Musik Terra rethorica w poezji Rimbauda, Katowice 2006; K. Kuczyńska-Koschany Recepcja poetycka Rimbauda jako synapsa Młodej Polski i międzywojnia, “Ruch Literacki” 2020, iss. 1 (358).