Happy Birthday, Arthur Rimbaud

“Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”

―Arthur Rimbaud

The great prodigy poet, Arthur Rimbaud, was born on this day in 1854. Not too long after his untimely death in 1891, he became one of the most “destructive and liberating influences on 20th-century culture,” in the words of his biographer.

Henry Miller once wrote: “What Rimbaud did for language, and not merely for poetry, is only beginning to be understood. And this more by readers than by writers, I feel. At least, in our country. Nearly all the modern French poets have been influenced by him. Indeed, one might say that contemporary French poetry owes everything to Rimbaud. Thus far, however, none have gone beyond him — in daring or invention.”

Bob Dylan has often cited Rimbaud as his favorite poet. He once wrote these lines in a song on his brilliant 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks:

Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.
But there's no way I can compare,
All those scenes to this affair,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go...

Nick Tosches, in his fierce novel, Me and the Devil: A Novel, wrote this:

"In the folly and self-torture of trying to say what cannot be said lies nothing but ruin. This is why the greatest of writers have in the end always forsaken words for silence. As George Steiner said: 'The true masters are those who relinquish their vocation.' ...

It was Rimbaud who saw the light earliest, quitting the racket six days before his twenty-first birthday, to run guns and coffee in Africa”

Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and many other artists and musicians were greatly influenced by the young French poet. In honor of Rimbaud’s birthday tonight, I’d like to share one of his poems called “Vagabonds.”

According to Reynolds Price at the Poetry Foundation, this poem “is, inescapably, a recreation of the terrible last days of his long affair with Verlaine—after their escape from Paris to London or even in their brief reunion in Brussels, where Verlaine wounded Rimbaud with a pistol shot and at last ended their cursed but mutually prolific union.”

I hope you enjoy it.

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Vagabonds

Pitiful brother—the dreadful nights I owed him! “I’ve got no real involvement in the business. I toyed with his weakness, so—it was my fault—we wound up back in exile and enslavement.”

He saw me as a loser, a weird child; he added his own prods.

I answered my satanic doctor, jeering, and made it out the window. All down a landscape crossed by unheard-of music, I spun my dreams of a nighttime wealth to come.

After that more or less healthy pastime, I’d stretch out on a pallet. And almost every night, soon as I slept, my poor brother would rise—dry mouth and bulging eyes (the way he’d dreamt himself!)—and haul me into the room, howling his stupid dream.

Truly convinced, I’d vowed to take him back to his primal state—child of the sun—and so we wandered, fed on wine from the caves and gypsy bread, me bound to find the place itself and the code.

This poem was translated by Reynolds Price.