Rimbaud...
Nov. 12th, 2003 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fajrdrakoBack when I studied French lit I loved the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and I always meant to read more about him. I just read an article in the New Yorker, Arse Poetica by Ruth Franklin.
All I knew about Rimbaud, besides the poems I'd read, was that he and Paul Verlaine had been lovers and he had shot Verlaine. I'd vaguely thought it was a duel, and that he'd killed Verlaine, but no: according to this, it was a quarrel, and he just wounded him.
This article makes him seem much more interesting than I'd guessed. Apparently at a young age he simply stopped writing at all - after having written some of the most innovative and brilliant poetry of his time. He went on to be an adventurer in the Middle East and Asia, and eventually a businessman in Africa. Never wrote again.
Franklin cites this passage as sounding like a farewell to poetry:
For sale: living places and leaving places, sports, extravaganzas and creature comforts, and all the noise, movement, and hope they foment!
For sale: mathematical certainties and astonishing harmonic leaps. Unimaginable discoveries and terminologies - available now.
She ends: "The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of one."
It seems to me that Rimbaud when young went through a lot emotionally - not just the strain of genius, but the volatile passions of his relationship with Verlaine. Perhaps he just had too much. Creativity can disappear under distress, disease, or depression - and perhaps Rimbaud had just had too much pain, and turned away from it. Turned away from poetry, and from love, becoming a loner who didn't write poetry. I wonder if he ever read it, after that.
I found it interesting that they lived together "openly" in both England in France, in what must have been the early to mid 1970 - a time, I would have thought, of horrible sexual repression and viciousness on the part of the law against gays. But Verlaine didn't go to prison till after the shooting incident, because a doctor reported him. That surprises me. Was society being tolerant, or just pretending to be oblivious? Obviously neither man cared much about discretion.
This account reminds me of the biography I read of Sir Richard Burton. In both cases, the subject was a nineteenth-century orientalist, bisexual, and not treated with much sympathy or understanding by the modern biographer. For whatever reason.
I should really read a biography of Rimbaud, so I'd know what I was talking about. There was a movie about them, too, a few years ago, which I haven't seen. A search on IMDb tells me it must be
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Back when I studied French lit I loved the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and I always meant to read more about him. I just read an article in the New Yorker, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?031117crbo_books" target="blank">Arse Poetica</a> by Ruth Franklin.
All I knew about Rimbaud, besides the poems I'd read, was that he and Paul Verlaine had been lovers and he had shot Verlaine. I'd vaguely thought it was a duel, and that he'd killed Verlaine, but no: according to this, it was a quarrel, and he just wounded him.
This article makes him seem much more interesting than I'd guessed. Apparently at a young age he simply stopped writing at all - after having written some of the most innovative and brilliant poetry of his time. He went on to be an adventurer in the Middle East and Asia, and eventually a businessman in Africa. Never wrote again.
Franklin cites this passage as sounding like a farewell to poetry:
<ul>
For sale: living places and leaving places, sports, extravaganzas and creature comforts, and all the noise, movement, and hope they foment!
For sale: mathematical certainties and astonishing harmonic leaps. Unimaginable discoveries and terminologies - available now.
</ul>
She ends: "The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of one."
It seems to me that Rimbaud when young went through a lot emotionally - not just the strain of genius, but the volatile passions of his relationship with Verlaine. Perhaps he just had too much. Creativity can disappear under distress, disease, or depression - and perhaps Rimbaud had just had too much pain, and turned away from it. Turned away from poetry, and from love, becoming a loner who didn't write poetry. I wonder if he ever read it, after that.
I found it interesting that they lived together "openly" in both England in France, in what must have been the early to mid 1970 - a time, I would have thought, of horrible sexual repression and viciousness on the part of the law against gays. But Verlaine didn't go to prison till after the shooting incident, because a doctor reported him. That surprises me. Was society being tolerant, or just pretending to be oblivious? Obviously neither man cared much about discretion.
This account reminds me of the biography I read of Sir Richard Burton. In both cases, the subject was a nineteenth-century orientalist, bisexual, and not treated with much sympathy or understanding by the modern biographer. For whatever reason.
I should really read a biography of Rimbaud, so I'd know what I was talking about. There was a movie about them, too, a few years ago, which I haven't seen. A search on IMDb tells me it must be <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114702/" target="blank"<i>Total Eclipse</i></a>, which, my goodness, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, presumably as Rimbaud. No wonder I didn't go to see it. But the screenplay is by Christopher Hampton, who did <i>Dangerous Liaisons</i>, which is one of my favourite movies, so that's promising.
The write-up calls it "sensationalized retelling of the Rimbaud-Verlaine story". Sensationalized? How can you sensationalize something that, from the bare historical facts, is already at the extreme of human behaviour? Or, more to the point, how could you un-sensationalize it?
<br>
Back when I studied French lit I loved the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and I always meant to read more about him. I just read an article in the New Yorker, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?031117crbo_books" target="blank">Arse Poetica</a> by Ruth Franklin.
All I knew about Rimbaud, besides the poems I'd read, was that he and Paul Verlaine had been lovers and he had shot Verlaine. I'd vaguely thought it was a duel, and that he'd killed Verlaine, but no: according to this, it was a quarrel, and he just wounded him.
This article makes him seem much more interesting than I'd guessed. Apparently at a young age he simply stopped writing at all - after having written some of the most innovative and brilliant poetry of his time. He went on to be an adventurer in the Middle East and Asia, and eventually a businessman in Africa. Never wrote again.
Franklin cites this passage as sounding like a farewell to poetry:
<ul>
For sale: living places and leaving places, sports, extravaganzas and creature comforts, and all the noise, movement, and hope they foment!
For sale: mathematical certainties and astonishing harmonic leaps. Unimaginable discoveries and terminologies - available now.
</ul>
She ends: "The Nasty Fellows thought they had been summoned to the birth of a genius, but what they actually witnessed was the death of one."
It seems to me that Rimbaud when young went through a lot emotionally - not just the strain of genius, but the volatile passions of his relationship with Verlaine. Perhaps he just had too much. Creativity can disappear under distress, disease, or depression - and perhaps Rimbaud had just had too much pain, and turned away from it. Turned away from poetry, and from love, becoming a loner who didn't write poetry. I wonder if he ever read it, after that.
I found it interesting that they lived together "openly" in both England in France, in what must have been the early to mid 1970 - a time, I would have thought, of horrible sexual repression and viciousness on the part of the law against gays. But Verlaine didn't go to prison till after the shooting incident, because a doctor reported him. That surprises me. Was society being tolerant, or just pretending to be oblivious? Obviously neither man cared much about discretion.
This account reminds me of the biography I read of Sir Richard Burton. In both cases, the subject was a nineteenth-century orientalist, bisexual, and not treated with much sympathy or understanding by the modern biographer. For whatever reason.
I should really read a biography of Rimbaud, so I'd know what I was talking about. There was a movie about them, too, a few years ago, which I haven't seen. A search on IMDb tells me it must be <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114702/" target="blank"<i>Total Eclipse</i></a>, which, my goodness, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, presumably as Rimbaud. No wonder I didn't go to see it. But the screenplay is by Christopher Hampton, who did <i>Dangerous Liaisons</i>, which is one of my favourite movies, so that's promising.
The write-up calls it "sensationalized retelling of the Rimbaud-Verlaine story". Sensationalized? How can you sensationalize something that, from the bare historical facts, is already at the extreme of human behaviour? Or, more to the point, how could you un-sensationalize it?
<br>
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 03:01 pm (UTC)Auden wrote a poem entitled "Rimbaud"
"The nights, the railway arches, the bad sky,
His horrible companions did not know it;
But in that child the rhetoricians lie
Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.
"Drinks bought him by his weak and lyric friend
His five wits systematically deranged,
To all accustomed nonsense put an end;
Till he from lyre and weakness was estranged.
"Verse was a special illness of the ear;
Integrity was not enough; that seemed
The hell of childhood: he must try again.
"Now, galloping through Africa, he dreamed
Of a new self, a son, an engineer,
His truth acceptable to lying men."
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 07:45 pm (UTC)It's nice to think that Auden succeeded where Rimbaud failed.