At 5:34am, I’m sitting on the sofa just beginning my second cup of coffee and contemplating those old, needling notions of life’s wandering pathways and legacy. The upstairs neighbor has just turned on the shower. The foghorn bellows. It’s dark outside.
I was reading the poem, “Shatterings,” by Stephen Dunn when a reference to the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s gun running sent me to the Wikipedia page about Rimbaud. While I know the name, I’ve never read any of Rimbaud’s poetry, and I knew nothing about his life. His was one of those wild and adventurous lives that only seems possible in ages past. As a prodigy, he published his first poem at the age of fifteen. He stopped writing literature when he was twenty. He died of cancer at thirty-seven. In his teens he ran away to Paris (more than once). On his first trip, he was arrested and imprisoned for fare evasion. He later moved to Paris where he had an affair with the poet Paul Verlaine. The two of them became drunken vagabonds frequently using absinthe and opium. During a reunion in Brussels, the two poets argued and Verlaine shot Rimbaud. After he gave up writing, he traveled extensively. He joined the Dutch Colonial Army in Indonesia but deserted and fled into the jungle. Towards the end of his life he became a coffee trader and gun merchant in Ethiopia.
I have to imagine that most people, like me, know very little about Rimbaud. Yet, he was a writer who has influenced other writers like Albert Camus, and Octavio Paz; he has “inspired anti-rationalist revolutions in America, Italy, Russia, and Germany;” and he’s influenced popular musicians like Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, and Bob Dylan. The Poetry Foundation writes of Rimbaud, “The impact of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry has been immense” and, ” He was the enfant terrible of French poetry in the second half of the 19th century and a major figure in symbolism. His works continue to be widely read and translated into numerous languages.” In 2020 there was a strong push to move Rimbaud’s and Verlaine’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris.
Again, aside from knowing that he was a major figure in French literature, I knew nothing about Rimbaud’s poetry or life… which has me feeling not only woefully uneducated, but also a little lost in the immensity of the world and the scope of human history. Most of us will not live lives like Rimbaud’s. Most of us won’t ever achieve the influence Rimbaud had – yet, at least among the average American, I suspect he’s obscure. And in an age of “influencers” and “creators” and “founders” I’m stuck wondering (in the early morning dark) where people like Rimbaud fit in while also marveling at how inconsequential (or influential) today’s self-important youtube and tik-tok stars will be a hundred years from now.