Jon's Reviews > Rimbaud: Poems

Arthur Rimbaud remains something of an enigma. Which is probably the way he wanted it all along ...

This is an interesting collection as it begins with some of his earliest known poems and moves right on through to when he gave up on writing shortly before he left to pursue his fortunes abroad. There is so much we don't know about the man and what he actually thought.

I think that is why Rimbaud has always fascinated would be biographers. I have read a few of the bios out there and they are all pretty much the same. Rimbuad seems to drop off the face of the earth around 1870. No one seems to understand why he went to Africa and why he stayed there until he was dying.

I say the clues are in the poems, people, RTFP. READ THE FUCKING POEMS!

So with this collection we begin with the young teenage poet in the dreary French hick town. The poem "Ophelia", his first, is a suprisingly good poem for a first try and contains some of that "lost" or "gone" imagery that, I think, is what truly sets his poetry apart.

We can argue genres here if we want, but to my way of thinking Rimbaud belongs in the same vein as Baudelaire and Verlaine. For the sake of simplicity I am simply going to refer to them as "symbolists". But what is important is the way they used language to convey poetic effects in a way that had not been seen before.

In many ways they were like painters. Especially Rimbaud who acknowledged trying to develop a "color pallette" for the vowels. Young Rimbaud struggled along at writing poetry with some hits and some misses. Much of his early poetry reflected the world of a young precocious upstart with little patience for the conventions, artistic and social, of his day.

Rimbaud's early poetry refelects too much his provincialism and his sometimes straining efforts at "worldliness". But suddenly he plunks out this long poem entitled "The Drunken Boat" which sustains its high level of intensity throughout and does not waver. The use of language is hallucinatory and phantasmagoric. It is an incredible achievement and his stature as a major poet is guaranteed by this poem if nothing else.

Rimbaud gives away his life plan in "Barbarian" where he foretells his life in Africa and presents us with the reasons why he was happy living the life of a colonial trader. RTFP - he always fantasized from early on about explorers and the discovery of new unspoiled lands. He saw a more moral life in the life of the "savages" as opposed to the civilized boobs and hypocrites in modern industrial Europe of the mid 19th century.

Rimbuad - a very interesting study in the beginning of the Modernist era. Industrialism, Nationalism, Colonialism - all modern sicknesses or diseases that Rimbaud was very aware of and which he analyzed in his own way in his work. I think Rimbaud along side Jack the Ripper would make an interesting case study of those who were disaffected by and reacting to the negative aspects of what we might call the Modern Life.

I am far from a poetry expert, but with regard to the colour palette, it was my understanding that Rimbaud had grapheme-colour synaesthesia, and hence the colour-vowel associations. Was this not the case? And thanks for the great review.

Regards, R..