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an insight that none of the violences of his career was able to
brutalize or stultify. When he is used merely as a touchstone to a
social, sexual, or exclusively aesthetic argument, there results a
shrinking of this insight, a simplification of his powers of criticism
and synthesis. His famous sentences then begin to sound ludicrous;
his dynamic as a poet is curtailed. His reality as a human being
is also diminished. Biographical research, commonly and often
justly accused of obscuring the aesthetic virtue of a poet, is likely
to have the opposite result with Rimbaud. That is what gives im–
portance, beyond its scrupulous research and well-reasoned inter–
pretation, to Miss Starkie's admirable book, which now supersedes
other existing biographies. It is legend, theory, and the inflation
of his texts in the manner of a disputed gospel that threaten to
make Rimbaud a confusing and unread poet.
If
one must approach
him in terms of parable, it is safer to see him not as the germinal
source of every cult or doctrine of our age, but as the culmination
of the preceding obsessions of poetic revolt and individualism in
Nineteenth Century Europe. However much his abnormal nature
as poet and man gives him the force of a test-case in the arguments
of Marxist and Freudian critics, Catholic converts, and symbolist
or surrealist apologists, he becomes far more convincing if viewed
as the Messiah toward whose coming every earlier romantic poet
was a signal or a prophet.
The
Rimbaud vivant
of French journalism is the mixed crea–
tion of his admirers, and there are signs that this character is
becoming popularized abroad, since he is less likely to dispel the
symbolic value of the poet who once lived and wrote in all too
human body and "tried out the whole century to come in advance."
"It is assumed," says Mr. Schwartz, "as with so many others, that
his life interprets his poetry. One gets much more illumination by
permitting our lives to interpret his text." This holds for any
understanding of poetry to some degree, but it holds here with
necessary qualifications. Rimbaud's text, in its fullest dimensions,
is the true illumination of his genius. In that text there is much
that can be recovered, understood, and translated less in terms of
our
lives and prepossessions than through the spiritual and tem–
peramental growth of the child of Charleville. His youthful home,
his study of Greek, Latin, and common-school science, his wander–
ings, the fantastic months in Brussels and London, his humiliating
