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PARTISAN REVIEW
plete disintegration of human consciousness. At that point he
rejected the
Paradis Artificiels
of the hallucinated intelligence; "it
is in this moral conclusion that Baudelaire's real meaning is to be
found and it is he himself who calls it moral." Facing in self–
induced hallucination and derangement the implications of suicide,
Baudelaire was thrown back on his humanity, his personal iden–
tity, the tragic conflict of his instinctive and intelligent natures. In
that conflict and in the tension it imposed on his sensibility lies the
specific force of his poetry. Rimbaud broke with Baudelaire in
refusing to accept the conditions of human life. They must be
altered. The derangement of the senses must be complete and sys·
tematic. The dissolution of conceptual reality must be as thorough–
going as is the dissolution of sensory impressions through the cor–
respondences and associations set up by poetic imagination. The
poet as
voyant
must become the true seer, the godhead of essences.
This was Rimbaud at the outset of his career, at the threshold
of Paris and at the age of fifteen. Within five years he was to learn
why Baudelaire was thrown back on his conscious existence as a
man, on his inescapable moral identity. The learning took so
intense a form of reaction and disgust that it deprived him of the
will to write, and his career as poet broke off at the age of twenty.
He is a lesser poet than Baudelaire by the degree to which he
delayed and finally evaded the integration of his moral nature with
his creative vision. He had once written to lzambard and Demeny
that "the final apotheosis of the poet would be reached only when
he had acquired full knowledge of himself, of all his faculties and
how best to use them"; when, too, he would realize that "he has
charge of humanity" and must make his visions known to others.
When he said that he had not yet learned how relentless are the
claims of selfhood and of human service.
Rimbaud is the sworn enemy of sham, meanness, and every
dishonesty that enslaves the dignity and vision of man, but this is
not to say that the critic in him coincides with the poet or that his
animus is essentially that of a critical intelligence. He would have
been a dull creature had he remained blind to the impotence and
brutality of his century. It hardly took a great poet to see and
anathemize these. The Nineteenth Century poets had a great stock
of popular sentiment and theological approval to draw on for sup·
port. Hugo and Swinburne had certain acceptable convictions in
