Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet who is known for his influence on modern literature and arts, which prefigured surrealism. Born in Charleville-Mézières, he started writing at a very young age and was a prodigious student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home amidst the Franco-Prussian War. After running away, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, he began the bulk of his literary...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth20 October 1854
CountryFrance
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter.
I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.
It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.
And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.
I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.
The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses
I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.
And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.
Hay que ser absolutamente Moderno
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic. I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
What am I doing here?
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!
Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.