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 went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.
Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry, Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!
What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?
I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.
Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper - both of us - in ecstasy!
I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.
Morality is the weakness of the mind.
The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.
The poet makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences.
A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?
Unhappiness was my god.
O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.
And from then on, I bathed in the Poem of the Sea, star-infused, and opalescent, devouring green azures