/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.4930924]

I truly believe Rimbaud's renunciation of writing is his real masterpiece.

Think about it, a child prodigy who was a master of the language and of verse, creates poems and prose that forever changed the entire literary world, by 21. He had a whole life to create further brilliant works, but stopped, suddenly - not even completing his final prose work

The silence is the true work of art.

[Anonymous No.4930933]

I liked and identified with Rimbaud until I turned 20 I think, and then he just stopped meaning anything to me. Its like I forgot how to read him.

[Anonymous No.4930950]

I don't know. His silence is pretty significant, he even anticipated it. But we wouldn't care about it were it not for his poems and his "diamond prose" as Verlaine called it. If something has to be considered "a true work of art" that transcends Rimaud's writings, then it is his writings followed by his silence.

But honestly his wrtings (all of them) deserve to be studied more. We talk too much bout how gifted he was, how good a poet he was, how stunning his life was, and we forget that his works deserve a close, sustained, detailed reading.

[Anonymous No.4931040]

I think Rimbaud's masterpiece is his profound ability to mirror other greats writers (Baudelaire, Hugo - his two main influences) and then eclipse them - making it look like he was the original.

As for his 'silence' - you seem to imply that is was done on purpose, which simply cannot be said. There is too much ambiguity around his writings and life to ever really assume anything about him.

In my opinion he is one of the most interesting, complex and brilliant people to have ever lived. His passion for all things spontaneous, ambiguous and adventurous make him too unpredictable to draw conclusions on his actions.

He lived more of a life than a whole generation of men did.

[Anonymous No.4931071]

>search 'Rimbaud' on reddit
>comes up with all these gay pictures of some fag with rimbaud in his username

[Anonymous No.4931134]

>>4931040
>I think Rimbaud's masterpiece is his profound ability to mirror other greats writers (Baudelaire, Hugo >- his two main influences) and then eclipse them - making it look like he was the original.

You're making it sound a bit like he had no original achievement of his own. But his language (particularly in his prose and later poems) has a disorienting, deliberately uneasy quality, which is achieved with great effect, and that you find in neither Hugo nor Baudelaire.

Hugo is a carver of marble giants, a painter of epic battles (even when he describe the tiniest things !), in short, a Michel-Ange of the alexandrine. Baudelaire is an organ player, except he has not only notes but perfumes, colors, aching memories and wandering hopes, or rather recallings of them (since in Baudelaire everything is about suggestion). The first impress your mind with his cisel, the second plays, now delicately, now frantically on your nervous system.

And Rimbaud is-what ? A fool perhaps, a crazy man in filthy rags; an unsettler certainly. Unsettler nails it: as in nomad, but a nomad that actually makes you reconsider nomadism for yourself. A prophet of restlessness. And nothing embodies that restlessness better than this language of his, that is always swinging a preconceptions, at established certainties, but without ever settling for anything else. He looks like he's furiously getting at something, but you never quite get to know what, because there is no explicit something to get. Poetry in Rimbaud is not a statement or a achievement but an experience.

Now that's merely my half-witted attempt at describing what I feel while reading Rimbaud. But I strongly insist that those are not just vague feelings I get from the themes he convokes, rather, it's a genuine intellectual puzzlement at the way he handles verse. It's not alexandrine as usual, it's no proper French verse. It's no Racine, no Hugo, not even Baudelaire who still was a classicist in the hert of his form. It's like an attempt at dislocating the French verse while still refusing to lapse back into prose. As Valéry put it: "all poetry is written in the language of common sense. Except Rimbaud's". This is a teenager who made master poets sound tame, not because he dared face-to-face provocation (the Romantic engine had fueled on that before he was born) but because he makes sure to knock off that aesthetical couch you've been lying onto, and suddenly sets you off balance.

In reading Rimbaud, you would perhaps expect an eruption, springs of magma, volcanoes of juvenile enthusiasm and provocation. You will find some of that, but if you read him French, chances are you will be stricken by how weird, how obstinately uncomfortable he is. Rimbaud isn't the first to write bold, to write rebellious (Hugo did it before, as well as Gautier), to write sensual or corrupt (that's the privilege of Baudelaire): he is the first to write disharmony.

[Anonymous No.4931138]

>>4931134
heart of his form*
So much for my credibility.

[Anonymous No.4931699]

qt

[Anonymous No.4932012]

>>4931134
this is really good

[Anonymous No.4932016]

>>4931134
>a crazy man in filthy rags
change that to a crazy child in filthy rags

and its spot on

[Anonymous No.4932018]

What's with all the Rimbaud threads suddenly?