Delirium by Jeremy Reed Read Free Book Online Page B

demand: — but it is not so.
     
                  The prophetic note inherent in Rimbaud’s visionary prescriptions, which demand both a return to the intuitive response of primitive poetry and a means of projecting into the future — ‘let us ask the poet for something new’ — is a dramatic anticipation of certain modes of thought which have become a pattern in the twentieth century. Rimbaud had already dismissed his century as inert, immobile and little likely to improve. By mid-century poetry is usually stuck in a rut, and a plethora of derivative poets continue to live off the major voice from an earlier time. Like Lautréamont, Rimbaud was already living in the century he was never to reach. He would have poetry live in advance of action, rather than be the reflective principle commenting on the age’s discoveries. It is up to the poet to get there first. ‘And there will be poets like this!’ he assures us. They were to come in number in another time, another place. Rilke, Trakl, Apollinaire, Breton, St-John Perse, Eliot, Neruda, Montale — these are a few who have brought a new poetics to bear on the twentieth century. And Rimbaud envisages the psychosexual emancipation of women. She too has a vital part to play in the discovery of the unknown. Once she has freed herself from man’s ‘abominable’ denial and repression of her inner motives, she will more closely respond to the poetic summons than man, with his overriding impulse towards warfare and territorial imperatives.
                  Rimbaud was looking for a new race, a people who would invent the future according to the instruction of vision. The world could be imagined into existence. The atman, the supra-human, was he who cultivated his visionary faculties for the arrival of a new dawn.
                  Rimbaud knew himself capable of undertaking the heroic task set the poet, one even more daring in its social implications than Shelley’s animated conviction that the imagination represents creative fire. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry comes close to Rimbaud’s Lettres du voyant in its declared Promethean beliefs that the inspired poet re-creates the world. Poets are in Shelley’s words, ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. But Shelley’s upbringing, his classical education, his mythomania, would never have allowed him to go as far as Rimbaud. To conceive of the poet as ‘the great criminal’, and to suggest that women have as important a part to play in imaginative discovery as men, are ideas that link Rimbaud not only with the succeeding century but with ongoing continuity. There will never be a poetry in which Rimbaud does not play a part.
                  In reality he was too poor even to stamp his letters. His mother believed that if she deprived him of money he would either return to his studies or be forced to find a job. He consented to neither. If he was questioned, he replied: ‘Shit’. He threw lice from his hair at Charleville antagonists, and gave readings of poems such as `Accroupissements’, ‘Les Premières Communions’ and ‘Le Cœur volé’ at Charles Bretagne’s house. Someone had to be shot down. Banville was a good target; the florist poet whom Rimbaud had begun by tolerating was ripe to receive a satellite message of Rimbaudian insolence. Having satirized Banville in his poem `Ce qu’on dit au poëte à propos de fleurs’, he thought it necessary to remind the eminent poet of his existence.
     
                  Sir and dear Master
                  Do you remember receiving from the provinces, in June 1870, a hundred or a hundred and fifty mythological hexameters entitled Credo in unam? You were kind enough to answer!
                  The same imbecile is sending you the above verses, signed Alcide Bava. — I beg your pardon.
                  I am eighteen. — I shall always love Banville’s