ARTHUR RIMBAUD
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one of the worst in modern poetry. This influence, as commonly
understood, becomes an affair of sentimental and mystical preten–
sions and of a verbal recklessness that completely dispels the
primary virtue of his art. That virtue is rooted in the rigor of his
moral realism, in his lacerating study of selfhood and all that its
mastery requires, and in the fact that to achieve a unity of his
moral and poetic natures, he spared himself nothing. His radical
criticism of the popular poets of Hugo's generation was that they
had vision without realization: "La culture de leurs ames s'est
commencee aux accidents." "Musset, tenfold loathsome to a suf–
fering generation like ours, carried away by visions of higher
things which his angelic sloth only insults. Oh! these mawkish
Comedies et Proverbes!
Oh! the
Nuits! ...
Oh! Musset! Charming
his love, isn't it? That painting on enamel, what solid poetry! ·...
Musset was able to achieve nothing! There were visions behind the
veil that hid them, but he only closed his eyes." When Rimbaud
found his first great literary passion in the work of Baudelaire, he
found an aesthetic that came as a revelation of the true unity and
totality of poetry and of its future in enlarging the vision and
experience of man. The doctrine of correspondences, with its
promise of godhead in the form of the complete poetic vision,
came as the charter of a new age of truth. But it came in the work
of a poet who brought the
th~::oretic
statement of the unity of art as
found in Schopenhauer or Ballanche out of abstraction into the
realism of the lyric experience. Baudelaire was for Rimbaud the
first of the poets whose art seems "to be a complete picture of life
in all its complexities, in which the highest mingles with the lowest,
aspirations with failures ... flesh and spirit, dream and nightmare
all at once." He was the poet above all others of modern Europe
who had a sense of the form that poetic realization must take if it
is
to subsume the full experience and consciousness of man. Baude–
laire was the one poet in whom Rimbaud found a dramatization of
moral reality and creative ordeal:
Plonger au fond du gouffre, Enfer ou Ciel qu'importe?
Au fond de l'incormu pour trouver du nouveau.
Rimbaud followed Baudelaire faithfully up to the moral crisis in
his poems, the moment where Baudelaire saw that the reckless
indulgence of sense and its consequence dissolution of man's
standards of moral judgment meant a diminution and even a com-
