Letter from ARTHUR RIMBAUD
Romanticism has
never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it?
The critics!! The Romantics? Who prove so clearly
that the song is very seldom the work, that is, the
idea sung and understood by the singer. For I is some
one else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn't to
blame...The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a
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, keeping only
their quintessence’s. Ineffable torture in which he will
need all his faith and superhuman strength, the great
criminal, the great sick man, the accursed, and the supreme
savant! For he arrives at the unknown! Since he has
cultivated his soul-richer to begin than any other! He
arrives at the unknown: and even if, half crazed, in the
end, he loses the understanding of his visions, he has
seen them! Let him be destroyed in his leap by those
unnamable, unutterable and innumerable things: there will
come other horrible workers: they will begin at the
horizons where he has succumbed... A language must be
found; as a matter of fact, all speech being an idea,
the time of a universal language will come! When the
infinite servitude of woman shall have ended...she too
will be a poet. Woman will discover the unknown. She
will discover strange, unfathomable things, repulsive,
delicious. Inventions of the unknown demand new forms.