The Future Belongs to the Poet

By: Henry Miller

“We live entirely in the past, nourished by dead thoughts, dead creeds, dead sciences. And it is the past which is engulfing us, not the future. The future always has and always will belong to—the poet.”

― Henry Miller

In the late ’40s, Henry Miller wrote a little-known book called “The Time of the Assassins.” It’s a study of one of his literary idols — the French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

“What Rimbaud did for language,” writes Miller, “and not merely for poetry, is only beginning to be understood.”

According to the publisher, “the social function of the creative personality is a recurrent theme with Henry Miller, and this book is perhaps his most poignant and concentrated analysis of the artist’s dilemma.”

The following is a passage from the book where Miller reflects on the condition and vitality of the poet, the dreamer, the inspired madman—those lone individuals who are the only true rebels in a “rotten society.”

I hope you enjoy it!

---

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun.

His dreams of a regenerate world are but the reverberations of his own fevered pulse beats. He imagines the world will follow him, but in the blue he finds himself alone. Alone but surrounded by his creations; sustained, therefore, to meet the supreme sacrifice.