“We need audacity, and yet more audacity, and always audacity”

- George Jacques Danton
1759 – 5 April 1794 (died on the guillotine)

Arthur Rimbaud 1854 –1891

This poet long in our mind is again in the news. A novel about his life by Bruce Duffy titled Disaster Was My God has recently been published by Doubleday. Keep in mind that Rimbaud wrote only in his late teens stopping at twenty years of age. He died at age thirty-seven.

Poets are often transfixed by where their thoughts originate. Archibald MacLeish commented that anyone who doubts that poetry can say what prose cannot has only to read Rimbaud. French poet Paul Valéry stated that "all known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud's” His inventive use of form and language influenced generations of poets to come and other artistic genres including the Symbolists, Dadaists and Surrealists.

Here are excerpts from Rimbaud letters written in 1871

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!

From “Education by Poetry” Robert Frost 1930

I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections—whether from diffidence or some other instinct.