Rimbaud and

Modern Poetry BOOKS OF THE DAY

By G. M. TURNELL

THE study of Rimbaud has been rich in critical disasters. He has suffered more than any other poet of his time at the hands of doctrinaire critics who wish to claim his patronage for a particular philosophy of life or a particular theory of aesthetic, and whose interest in his poetry is a very minor affair. This approach has obscured his importance as a poet

and prevented him from becoming the great force that he should have been in contemporary European poetry.

The first business of the critic of Rimbaud is to stress the technical importance of a writer who has more to offer living poets than any one I know. Thanks to the practice of Mr. T. S. Eliot, English poets have learnt all there was to learn from Laforgue's Derniers vers, but Une saison en enfer is still practically unexplored territory. In France the position is

not much better. It is true that the influence of Rimbaud's

poetry has been immense, but it has also been an immense disaster. Unfortunately—it is largely the result of doctrinaire criticism—the Illuminations has been studied and imitated and the Saison en enfer neglected. Later poets, such as the weaker surrealists, have fastened on one side of Rimbaud's work—the most personal and least fruitful as far as the develop- ment of poetry is concerned—and pushed it beyond all reason- able limits. This does not mean that the Illuminations does not contain great poetry, but it is essentially an experimental work. Tile method is such that it could only be successfully employed by someone with Rimbaud's vision.

The Saison en enfer is also an experimental work, but it is experimental in a different sense from the Illuminations. Its innovations are technical in a narrower, but at the same time a more fruitful sense. They are at least as original and important as those contained in the Derniers vers—as we can see by comparing the Saison en enfer with Baudelaire's Petits poimes en prose. Rimbaud was not the inventor of the " prose- poem" any more than-Laforgue was the inventor of free verse, but his experiments turned it into an instrument of marvellous

subtlety and flexibility. Both poets needed greater freedom than traditional French measures allowed, but they did so for different reasons. It is not without significance that Rimbaud's

experiments in free verse led nowhere, and that the parts in verse are the least distinguished of the Saison en enfer. Laforgue's free verse may be capable of effects that are beyond the range of the prose-poem, but the reverse is also true. What Laforgue did with incomparable artistry was to record the rapid shift and change of feeling within a prevailing mood ; what Rimbaud did was to show complete changes of mood: Laforgue's mood at the end of the Derniers vers is exactly the same as it was at the beginning ; but the Saison en enfer is the record of a spiritual crisis which altered the poet's mind, and the progress of this crisis could only be shown in a medium like the one used by Rimbaud.

The magnificent variety of the Saison en enfer can easily be illustrated Take the opening, for example : Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie etait un festin oà s'ouv- relent tons les coeurs, on tons les vins coulaient.

Un soir, j'ai assis la Beaute stir mes genotix.—Et je l'ai trouvee amere—Et je l'ai injuriee. Jo me suis arrne centre la justice. Je me stiis enfui. 0 sorcieres, 6 misere, 6 haine, c'est fi vous que mon tresor a ete confie !

The short, broken sentences and the hiss of the s's suggest the whispered confession of the penitent accusing himself in the confessional. This should be borne in mind, when we come to the section called " Delires," in which there is a mocking imitation of the confession of thp " Vierge folle," who is, of course, an ironical portrait of Verlaine :

(1) Rimbaud: Le Drame Spirituel: By Daniel-Rope. (Plon. 313.) 2) Rimbaud. By Etiemble and Y. Gauclere. (N. R. F. 3s. 9d.)

Ecoutons la confession d'un compagnon d'enfor "0 divin Epoux, mon Seigneur, ne refusez pas la confession de la plus triste de vos servantes. Je suis perdue. Je sills" softie. Je suis impure. Quelle vie !

Pardon' divin Seigneur, pardon ! Ah ! pardon ! Quo de larmes ! Et quo de larmes encore plus tard. respere ! "

The apparent humility, the mood of self-accusation, in which the poem opens changes a few pages later to a mood- of defiance. Rimbaud becomes, as one critic puts it, the mounte- bank addressing the crowd before his platform : " Pretres, professeurs, maitres, vous vous trompez en me livrant a la justice. Je n'ai jamais ete de ce peuple-ei ; je n'ai jamais ete chretien ; je suis de la race qui chantait dam le supplice ; je no comprends pas les lois ; je n'ai pas in sens moral, je suis une brute : vous vous trompez."

But the greatest triumph of all are the closing section's of the poem : • L'automne. Notre barque elevee dans les brumes immobiles tourne vers le port de in misere, la cite enorme an ciel tache do feu et de boue. Ah ! les haillons pourris, le pain trempe de plum, l'ivresse, les mille amours qui m'ont crucifie ! Elle ne finira done point cette genie reine de millions crimes et de corps moils et qui eeront juges I Je me revels, la peau rongee par la beue et Ia paste, des vers plein les cheveux et les aisselles et encore de plus gros yens dam le coeur, etendu parmi les inconnus sans age, sans sentiment. . . J'aurais pu y mourir . . . L'affreuse evocation ! J'execre la misere.

This passage has all the dignity, all the spaciousness of the grand style without any of its corresponding weaknesses,. I think it will be agreed that a style which moves so easily from one extreme to another, which is capable of such match- less variety of expression, deserves to be studied by living

poets. There is also another reason why the example of Rimbaud has a particular significance for our tithe. It seems as though the development of free verse has been carried as far as it can go for the time being, and that the next develop- ment will be in a medium resembling the one used by Rioabaud

in his greatest poem. It must not be forgotten that free verse has hitherto been used to express a particular attitude—

an attitude which appears, in the work of our younger poets, to be giving way to something more robust. For this reason,

one feels inclined to suggest that in future the Saison en enfer is likely to prove more valuable as a text-book for young poets than either The Waste Land or the Cantos of Mr. Pound, and that even the author of The Orators may perhaps have something to learn from it.

One of the most difficult problems connected with the study of Rimbaud is his renunciation of poetry at the age of nineteen and his " flight " to Africa. It is a problem that is discussed in the two latest additions to Rimbaud criticism, one written from a Catholic (1), the other from a Marxist point of view (2). Although the authors disagree on almost every other point, there seems to be a certain measure of agreement on the most crucial of all. It is treated by both (though for different reasons) as an indication of spiritual failure. "We can be sure," writes ' M. Daniel-lops, "that when he was frantically gold-grubbing in the severe climate' of Abyssinia, he was fully conseious that only the exterior of his being was engaged and that the rest, the truth, was not there." Unfortunately for M. Daniel-Rops's thesis, which makes Rimbaud's death-bed conversion the focal point of his life, we can be sure of nothing of the kind. His conversion may have saved his soul, but I cannot see that it had the slightest bearing on his poetry. The poetry of Rimbaud, like the poetry of Baudelaire, is only fully intelligible when it is seen to be the work of men who had been Catholics, but

who were no longer Catholics at the time when their poetry was written.

There is an alternative view which seldom receives the consideration it deserves. ' A large munber of people . . writes Mr. Edgell Riekword, "have seen in Rimbaud, the pioneer and explorer, a being superior to Rimbaud the poet. Certainly the finest qualities in his character found expression in these last ten years ; his indefatigable energy, his integrity,

initiative, and self-control, for which all that has gone before was, perhaps, only a training, were brought into play." !l lire is more evidence in Rimbaud's poetry for the second of these views than the first. It is true—the poet admits it— that the mystic quest for a new reality recounted in the illuminations and the Saison en enfer has ended. in failure ;

but that is a different thing from saying that the poem is a sign of spiritual failure on the part of the poet. What matters

is not the failure of the quest, but the attitude of the poet towards it. Although the Saisotz en enfer is the record of a

spiritual crisis through which the poet has passed, it is also its own solution. It ends not on a note of spiritual crisis, but on a note of complete serenity.

Quelquefois je vois au ciel des plages sans fin couvertes do blanches nations en joie. L'n grand vaisseau d'or, au-dessus de moi, agite ses pavilions multicolores sous lee brims du matin. J'ai cree toutes lea fetes, toils les triomphes, tous lea drames. J'ai essaye d'inventer de nouvelles ileurs, de nouveaux astres, de nouvelles chairs, de nouvelles langues. J'ai cru acquerir des pouvoirs surnaturels. Eh hien ! je dois enterrer mon imagination • ot mos souvenirs ! Une belle gloire d'artiste et de contour emportee!

Mei ! moi qui me suis dit maga ou ange, dispense de toute morale, je suis rendu au so!, avec un devoir a cliereher, et la realite rugueuse

etreinehe ! Paysan !

Instead of carrying him away into the Unknown, as it did in the Bateau ivre, the vessel is bearing him back to "rugged

reality." It is at once an astonishingly witty renunciation of his superhuman claims and a humble acceptance of the created order and the limitations it imposes.

Their peculiar serenity and calm make the last two sections of the poem unique in French poetry. They stand out against the nineteenth-century background as the unrivalled expression of complete spiritual health.