I shall, however, use them as points of departure and reference in a further survey of Rimbaud’s achievement and influence, both from my own and other observers’ vantage points. The quotations are suggestive, although short and, in most cases, undated, which makes it harder to assess their literary-historical significance. One of the most useful pieces was the last one, a selection of quotations from nine distinguished and concerned writers looking back at Rimbaud-or, in the case of Mallarmé, across, for the two were contemporaries. Thus the April 4-10 issue of Le Nouvel Observateur was a special Rimbaud number, containing several informative articles, critiques, inquiries, and even a quiz and a news story from Japan, where Rimbaud was helping advertise Suntory whiskey. In France, as might be expected, the situation is somewhat better. But where is Rimbaud in evidence-in books or bookstore windows, magazines or newspapers, lecture halls or cabarets-where? We are still stumbling along in his deep footprints in this year of 1991, when you cannot walk a few blocks in New York City without seeing the name of Mozart, another Wunderkind and anniversary boy, plastered all over: Mozart this and Mozart that. (There is also, to some extent, Stéphane Mallarmé, about whom later.) And he did it all before he fully grew up, after which he rejected literature, his own and everyone else’s, forever.īetween the ages of sixteen and somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, Rimbaud conducted all the experiments, made all the discoveries, raised all the questions modern poetry needed to accost. But in the event, it was this Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, born in Charleville in the Ardennes on October 20, 1854, and dead on November 10, 1891-in pain and wretchedness, with one leg and all his hopes amputated-that is the fountainhead of modern poetry as we know it. Rimbaud it could have been a Rimbaud of some other name, in some other place. For it to come to pass, a Rimbaud was required. Arthur Rimbaud was the begetter of modern poetry.
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