Theme: Paris

No, that's not really Rimbaud. Good eye. It's Leonardo DiCaprio portraying the young and insolent genius, Arthur Rimbaud. Total Eclipse stars Leo DiCaprio and David Thewliss as Paul Verlaine, another absinthe swilling poet, who has an affair with Rimbaud. I bring up this movie but it is actually a realistic depiction of the emotional, mental and artistic relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud and how it effected both of their works. They are both such a strong part of Parisian bohemian myth and the French cultural vernacular of art above all else, it's difficult to discuss Rimbaud without mentioning Verlaine. Why I love Rimbaud's work is that it has the very gritty and impetuosity of a precocious teenager. Honest and deeply perceptive, you see his progression through love, pain, his creative journey and the disillusionment with the world around him. He knows he is lucky, he knows he talented and he knows that he is just young enough to think that those are enough, especially here in Romance:

I Nobody's serious when they're seventeen. On a nice night, the hell with beer and lemonade And the cafe and the noisy atmosphere! You walk beneath the linden tress on the promenade. The lindens smell lovely on a night in June! The air is so sweet that your eyelids close. The breeze is full of sounds--they come from the town And the scent of beer, and the vine, and the rose... II You look up and see a little scrap of sky, Dark blue and far off in the night, Struck with a lopsided star that drifts by With little shivers, very small and white... A night in June! Seventeen! Getting drunk is fun. Sap like champagne knocks your head awry... Your mind drifts; a kiss rises to your lips And flutters like a butterfly... III Your heart Crusoes through novels, anywhere, When through the pale pool beneath the street light, A girl goes by with the most charming air, In the grim shadow of her father's dark coat. Ans since she finds you marvelously naive, while her little heels keep tapping along She turns, with a quick bright look... And on your lips, despairing, dies your song. IV You are in love. Rented out till fall. You are in love. Poetic fire ignites you. Your friends laugh; they won't talk to you at all. Then one night, the goddess deigns to write you! That night...you go back to the cafe, to the noisy atmosphere; You sit and order beer, or lemonade... Nobody's serious when they're seventeen, And there are linden trees on the promenade.

And this is one of his more innocent poems. He wrote ferociously for a short period of time, fueled by first by absinthe and later by opium, he lived fully the life of a boheme. His affair with Verlaine was torrential--he stabbed Verlaine in the hand, Verlaine shot him in the hand and Verlaine was then jailed for practicing sodomy with Rimbaud. Their love affair and lifestyle typified the decadent movement even thought they rarely had money, they managed to spend whatever money they got on getting drunk and buying hashish. Verlaine seemed to be the only one enamoured with Rimbaud's obnoxious behavior; they rest of his contemporaries found him unbearable. But Verlaine's marriage was a constant source of tension and eventually the demise of their relationship. After leaving Verlaine, Rimbaud penned the infamous A Season in Hell which ends with a realistic and sobering tone. But it begins 'ONCE, IF MY MEMORY SERVES ME WELL':

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed. one evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter--and I insulted her. I steeled myself against justice. I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care... I have withered within me all human hope. With the silent leap of a sullen beast, I have downed and strangled every joy. I have called for executioners; I want perish chewing on their gun butts, I have called for plagues, to suffocate in sand and blood. Unhappiness has been my god. I have lain down in the mud, and dried myself off in the crime-infested air. I have played the fool to the point of madness. And springtime brought me the frightful laugh of an idiot. Now recently, when I found myself ready to croak! I thought to seek the key to the banquet of old, where I might find an appetite again. That key is Charity. (This idea proves I was dreaming!) 'You will stray a hyena, etc...,' shouts the demon who once crowned me with such pretty poppies. 'Seek death with all you desires, and all selfishness, and all the Seven Deadly Sins.' Ah, I've taken too much of that: still, dear Satan, don't look so annoyed, I beg you! And while waiting for a few belated cowardices, since you value in a writer all lack of descriptive or didactic flair, I pass you these few foul pages from the diary of the Damned Soul.

Throughout this prose poem, we see his recognition of his self-indulgence, his grandiose self-entitlement, and we feel awarded for being seduced by the eloquent verse of this spoiled child, finally, with a A Season in Hell. My favorite are the following lines from FAREWELL:

....- Sometimes in the sky I see endless sandy shores covered with white rejoicing nations. A great golden ship, above me, flutters many-colored pennants in the morning breeze. I was a creator of every feast, every triumph, every drama. I tried to invent new flowers, new planets, new flesh, new languages. I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Ha! I have to bury my imagination and my memories! What an end to a splendid career as an artist and storyteller!

I love this! End your own career on your terms on one final, beautiful note. He died at thirty-seven years old, but it seemed he lived the lives of so many poets, but it was just the essence of those that came before him that is threaded through his poetry and the way he approached life. He epitomizes the Parisian poet and I am so glad that I can read the lines of a boy and of a man, who sacrificed all for the sake of poetry. He spat in the face of what should be done and followed what he believed regardless of his tempestuousness, his braggadocio. He was good and bad and that is what we all are.

As far as which book to consider for his poetry, there are many to choose from, but my favorite is the Everyman's Pocket Library. Also, check the fantastic biography by Edmund White, entitled Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel.