Rimbaud Arthur - Collected Poems

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

COLLECTED POEMS

ARTHUR RIMBAUD was born in Charleville, north-eastern France, in 1854, the second of four children. His mother came from a local farming family. His father, an army officer, abandoned the family six years later. At school the gifted, precocious Rimbaud was exceptionally successful. From a very early age he was writing poems, initially in Latin. By his teenage years he had outgrown his restricted life in provincial Charleville and had run away on a number of occasions, to Paris and to Belgium. In 1871 he formed a liaison with Verlaine. The two young poets soon fled Paris, living for many months in London. During all of this period Rimbaud was writing poetry. In 1873 Verlaine shot and wounded him, and their relationship ended. Rimbaud then spent some weeks writing the only work he saw through to publication, A Season in Hell, an account in prose and verse of his hopes for a new poetry, and their defeat. He completed the prose poems of Illuminations, begun before A Season. In 1875, however, aged 21, Rimbaud abandoned poetry altogether in disillusioned disgust and turned his back on everything in his former life. His remaining sixteen years were spent mainly out of France, the last years mostly in the Horn of Africa, where he worked as a trader. A tumour on his right knee forced him back to France, where the leg was immediately amputated. Still planning to return to Africa, he died of cancer in Marseilles in 1891 at the age of 37. The first edition of Rimbauds complete poems appeared in 1895; all his known work was published in 1898, edited by his brother-in-law.

MARTIN SORRELL is Reader in French and Translation Studies at the University of Exeter. His monograph Francis Ponge was published by Twayne in 1980; his bilingual anthology, Modern French Poetry, by Forest Books in 1992; Elles: A Bilingual Anthology of Modern French Poetry by Women was published by the University of Exeter Press in 1995; his Paul Verlaine: Selected Poems appeared in Oxford Worlds Classics in 1999. He also translates plays for stage and radio, and has written original stories and plays for BBC radio.

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For Liam, Bethany, Rachel, and Katie

Id have liked to show children blue-water
Dorados, golden fish and fish that sing

(Rimbaud)

The Stupra

Lclair

Dvotion

Rimbaud is the stuff of legend. A short, intense life, always on the edge, and brought to an early, agonizing end; the consistent refusal to take easy options; the astonishing firmness of will; the deliberate deregulation of the senses; the drugs; the homosexual phase; the arms-dealing in Africa; the slave-trading (unsubstantiated); above all, the astonishing precocity of major poetry written by the age of 21; the subsequent rejection of this poetrythese realities have combined to give Rimbaud a mythic status which, ironically, would have appalled him.

The significant factsdoing unlikely work, his back turned resolutely on family, friends, and poetry. Instead, his major concern became to develop trading possibilities in new African markets. However, thanks to his routine disregard for his physical well-being, a tumour that had developed in his right leg rapidly deteriorated, until he had to be brought in agony from the Horn of Africa to France, where the diseased leg was amputated. Still believing he could soon return to Africa, he died in Marseilles in 1891 of a generalized cancer. He was 37.

Rimbauds life as a poet was meteoric. It was over in just a few years, roughly from his early teens to the age of 21. As there are problems in giving precise dates for some of his poems, to talk of phases might seem invidious. Nevertheless, what does mark his earliest poems is an amount of imitation and pastiche, of his great, immediate predecessor Baudelaire and of other, lesser contemporaries of the Romantic and Parnassian schools. However, these aspects of his writing disappear as his own poetic voice, audible in fact even in his first poem, becomes more distinctive. Whatever other voices echo in Orphans New Year Gifts, Rimbauds own is the loudest. The subject-matter, the unblinking, intelligent gaze, and above all the sadness, hurt, and latent anger are his. Together, they sound the first notes of the song of exclusion he was to sing throughout his writing, and to continue in a different key after he had left poetry behind for good.

In this substantially autobiographical poem, from its title onwards Rimbaud sets himself apart. It is tempting, and probably justified, to attribute in part his orphan status to his family life. Biographers are agreed that