POETRY AND M. MARITAIN
407
the artisan aims at the finished chair, but on the transformation of
himself into a maker of poetry. The path to the page was indirect
-it led through the caves of Apollo. This detour in search of a
process
of poetic creation is analogous to the scientific way of
producing: to make one chair a week, the prolonged
"hahitus"
of
a craft is needed; a thousand a day are achieved only through the
laboratory. Poe and Baudelaire, relying on intelligible method
rather than upon the memory of forms, had seen the need for
systematic method. They had continued, however, to accept the
poet as he was, with his moods, poses, paraphernalia of Beauty.
Rimbaud threw all this aside. "Unfortunately," he says, "Baude–
laire lived in too artistic a milieu." Poetry must be cleansed of
everything belonging to the accidents of a trade or to personal
sentiment. Through the force of the "cultivated soul" the poet will
force the external world to transform itself into poetic substances.
Had it not formerly yielded up gods, angels, devils, and miracles
without end?
We need not discuss here the value of this program as a
criticism of religion. That Rimbaud's idea of the estrangement
of the ego was a practical hypothesis and not a mystical abandon–
ment of art is proved by its success in producing wonderful poems
in
great quantity for the duration of the test. Maritain is in the
position of accepting the results of an experiment while claiming
that the experiment tends to make such results impossible.
Like Poe and Baudelaire, Rimbaud, in both theory and prac–
tice, takes off from a critical analysis of poetry as a profession.
Personal need to decide on a career lends intensity to his judg–
ments. Long before he has conceived his doctrine of the "seer,"
his poems, letters, conversations, ring with revolt against the
metiers open to him. Later, the existing poetry business as a re–
spectable profession becomes the chief object of assault: as the
Parnassians professionally scorn the bourgeois, so Rimbaud
despises them. This gesture publicly declares poetry to be distinct
in
social function from other occupations.
The seer himself is shaped directly from judgments on work
and creation in existing society. Rimbaud's letter to lzambard in
which the plan for "making oneself a poet" is first mentioned
begins by ridiculing his former teacher's occupational ethics.
lzambard had raised in Rimbaud's mind the conventional argu-
