278
PARTISAN REVIEW
facile absolution either from his own conscience or from his fel–
low-men. His refusal of easy grace was as rigid as that of Leon
Bloy, and he shared Bloy's contempt for the vicarious modes of
Purgatory with which most modem poets are satisfied. His suf–
ferings after the flight from Paris could not, within the bounds of
sanity, have been as deliberately chosen as his vices were, but their
extremities raise his career to a level of appalling magnificence.
The scenes in London and Paris with Verlaine show a squalor
which none of the lyric beauties that grew out of them or the
exalted lines of
Delires
can dispel. But as we read of the five
years of homeless wandering by the outcast - "l'homme aux
semelles de vent"-between his departure from Paris at nineteen
and his first entry into Africa; as we see that interval reaching its
climax in his climb on foot across the Alps in a violent snowstorm,
coatless, hatless, through beating hailstones and a savage wind,
along sheer precipices and through blizzards that froze his hair
and beard, we are left astounded by the ruthlessness of a destiny
that few men of any kind have been able to survive.
In Rimbaud the forging of poetry was identical with the
forging of his spirit. His tragedy as a poet lies in the fact that the
conflict of elements in his nature exceeded those delicate and pre–
carious antitheses which must be held in balance if genius is to
rise articulate from its agony. The forging had to continue beyond
the point where the metal of poetic intelligence receives its temper.
The whole nature of the man demanded the fire. The poet, as Mr.
Abel says, suffered a fatal distempering, "a regression from the
civilized to the primitive, from poetry to prose, from prose to
silence." By the time Rimbaud died, seventeen years after his
abandonment of poetry, he had not only shown how unsparing is
the ordeal by which a man becomes the fit and conscious host of
the poet within him, but to what a tragedy of waste and violence
that ordeal, driven to excess by logic and instability, can lead.
Ill.
The surface values of Rimbaud's verse are not difficult to
read, but because they are too often read as values of .mere shock
and derangement they are easily reduced to the empty eloquence
and vitiating abstractness of thought that have made his influence
