Rimbaud: Life and Legend
Morton Dauwen Zabel
HAD
RIMBAUD NEVER LIVED
we should have been obliged to
invent him. One is conscious of many temptations to audacity in
reading the poet of
Le Bateau lvre
and
Une Saison en Enfer.*
One
is conscious in reading his critics and interpreters that these temp·
tations have seldom been resisted. They have resulted in some of
the boldest hypotheses and most strenuous flights of elucidation in
modern criticism. Not content with the poet on his own terms, in
his amazing and scarcely credible reality, his apologists have
endowed him with a succession of masks that fit almost every type
of spiritual and social ordeal in modern experience. Anyone ap·
proaching Rimbaud after half a century of such license and myth·
making must share Miss Starkie's feeling that it is time to call a
halt to speculation and to recover the poet and his poems in terms
as personal and local as possible. To do this can hardly do injustice
to his achievement; it will survive the closest identification. His
personality and career will always return to the larger dimensions
of poetic morality and the feeling will survive that without Rim·
baud the tenets of European romanticism would have lacked the
sublimation by which they were recreated in contemporary art. To
him Keats's sentence on Shakespeare applies with special fitness.
He led a life of allegory: his works are the comments on it.
No poet has invited as many incarnations in the private con·
venience or beliefs of his students or has become so dramatic an
index of the aesthetic divergences of our time. Rimbaud himself
was fascinated by the notion of avatar and mystic possession. He
read Plato, Ballanche, Cabalist texts, and Buddhist scriptures
ir
his search for a tradition that would support his sense of endow–
ment by powers beyond himself. From this sense of divine endow·
*Arthur Rimbaud,
by Enid Starkie. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. $3.75.
A Season in Hell,
by Arthur Rimbaud. Translated with an Introduction by Del·
more Schwartz. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions. $2.50.
Some Poems by Rimbizud.
Translated by Lionel Abel. New York: Exiles' Press. SOc.
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