ARTHUR RIMBAUD
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ment developed his experiments in derangement and hallucination,
his wish to create a new order of poetry, his effort to free himself
from the confines of his family, his class, his country, from
Europe itself. It crystallized in his talk of "becoming God" and in
his doctrine of the poet as
voyant.
He is certainly not a poet of
fixed and centered intelligence; however far his greatest poetry
succeeds in resolving the discordant elements of his genius, we are
wiser to refer the problem of unity in his character to psycholo–
gists, who should have no difficulty in defining a classic outline
behind the pattern of hereditary and childhood influences traced
by Miss Starkie. But the important thing for anyone to see who
attempts to understand the real nature of Rimbaud's poetic and
intellectual development is that he was more than normally con–
scious of his successive conflicts: of the rigid morality of his child–
hood with his sexual vagrancy, of his harshly rational mind with
mystical illuminism, of his classical schooling with his later
aesthetic doctrines, of Christian teaching with private or oriental
modes of occult vision, of his precocious misanthropy with his
humanitarian passion. He saw the collision between his personal–
ity as determined by nature and his identification of himself with
the seer who should transcend the limits of soul and body, dissolve
the arbitrary forms of European thought, and so release poetry
for its highest destiny in the liberation of man. These conflicts were
never obscured by the central complexity of his nature. His
audacities of conduct and vision were firmly framed within his
native equipment of pride, hard-headed industry, and ambition.
Until he was fifteen he was a submissive son, a diligent student
and prize-winner in the College de Charleville, an intelligence of
facile energy and brilliance. Once he got to Africa he won, despite
the futile outcome of most of his projects there, a reputation as a
shrewd trader, bargainer, and judge of men. The intensity and
anguish of his sensibility-his compulsion to sufferings that he
called "inexpressible" - were lodged in a spirit · of baffling
toughness.
When Rimbaud's critics simplify or inflate some facet of his
genius to the neglect or disparagement of others, they are not so
much explaining Rimbaud as diminishing his intelligence. He was
not a poet to boast of containing multitudes, hut his wit and subtlety
of mind were endlessly explorative. They bred and tested him in
