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PARTISAN REVIEW
ment that "one owes oneself to society." "You, yourself," the
youth retorts, "belong to the corps of teachers-you roll along in
a fine rut." As for him, his job is telling "stupid, filthy and
vicious" stories, for which he is "repaid" by his acquaintances
with entertainment. This, too, he contends, is serving society.
"At
bottom you see nothing in your principle [of owing oneself to
society] but subjective poetry.... Some day, I hope-many others
hope the same-1 shall see in your principle an objective poetry.
I shall see it more sincerely than you will. I shall be a worker.
. . . Work now-never, never. I am on strike."
Thus Rimbaud quickly sketches his view that all accepted
careers are equally repulsive because they merely satisfy the ego
-and places himself at the service of a clifferent conception of
work as "objective poetry." In the next paragraph comes the pro–
gram for realizing the objective idea at once in the profession of
poetry. Here first occur the words "I wish to be a poet and work
to make myself a seer.... It is false to say: I think. One should
say: I am thought. Pardon the play on words. I is another." In
the inspired act society and the individual are one, but beyond the
will or egotism of either.
What is most important about Rimbaud's statement, or re·
statement, of "I is another" is its affirmation at a given historical
moment as a professional creed, a kind of poetic Hippocratic oath,
as distinguished from the confession of a mystical celebrant or
"knower." Seen in these relations, which include the problem of
work, Rimbaud's idea of the poetic identity gives no support to
the mystifiers.
I have referred to the style in which the cultivation of the
poetic "I" is described. The terms in which Rimbaud evaluates
the effects of these rigors are equally non-metaphysical. His verbal
standard is positivistic and medical; so that the role he is preparing
himself for with so much enthusiasm is, in his own definition of it,
ironically condemned from the standpoint of society: the soul is
to be made
"monstrous"-it
is like
"planting
and
cultivating warts
on one's face"-the
senses are
"deranged"-"poisons·"-"crimi–
nal"-"accursed"-"horrible practitioners."
No mystic ever used
such epithets in naming the ineffable. The image of the new poetic
career is seen reflected in the social mirror of his mother and lzam·
bard-he accepts it from them, as it were, with rubber gloves.
