Rimbaud Illuminations Quotes

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

I shed more tears than God could ever have required.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

Elle est retrouvée! Quoi? -l'Éternité. C'est la mer allée Avec le soleil.

Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

I have stretched ropes from bell-tower to bell-tower; garlands from window to window; chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.

Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction, rejuvenate oneself through cruelty?

Quand le monde sera réduit en un seul bois noir pour nos quatre yeux étonnés, - en une plage pour deux enfants fidèles, - en une maison musicale pour notre claire sympathie, - je vous trouverai.

Il faut être absolument moderne

Je devrais avoir mon enfer pour la colère, mon enfer pour l'orgueil, - et l'enfer de la caresse; un concert d'enfers.

Against snow, a tall Beautiful Being. Whistlings of death and circles of muffled music make this adored body rise, swell and tremble like a ghost; scarlet and black wounds open in the magnificent flesh.

Here I am on the shore of Brittany. Let the cities light up in the evening. My day is done. I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, hung, and smoke especially. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal--just as my dear ancestors did around their fires.

La musique savante manque à notre désir

What will happen to the world when you leave it? Nothing, in any case, will remain of what is now visible.

Peut-on s'extasier dans la destruction, se rajeunir par la cruauté !

J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage.

J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de portes, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs.

Ho teso corde da campanile a campanile; ghirlande da finestra a finestra; catene d'oro da stella a stella, e danzo.

Je dis qu'il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.

I saw myself before an infuriated mob, facing the firing squad, weeping out of pity for the evil they could not understand, and forgiving!-Like Jeanne d'Arc!-'Priests, professors, masters, you are making a mistake in turning me over to the law. I have never belonged to this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race that sang under torture; laws I have never understood; I have no moral sense, I am a brute: you are making a mistake.' Yes, my eyes are closed to your light. I am a beast, a nigger. But I can be saved. You are sham niggers, you, maniacs, fiends, misers. Merchant, you are a nigger; Judge, you are a nigger; General, you are a nigger; Emperor, old itch, you are a nigger: you have drunk of the untaxed liquor of Satan's still.-Fever and cancer inspire this people. Cripples and old men are so respectable they are fit to be boiled.-The smartest thing would be to leave this continent where madness stalks to provide hostages for these wretches. I enter the true kingdom of the children of Ham.

Моя жизнь истощилась. Ну что ж! Притворяться и бездельничать будем, - о жалость!

Estendi cordas de campanário a campanário; guirlandas de janela a janela; correntes de ouro de estrela a estrela, e danço.

cement in bold relief,—far underground. I lean my elbows on the table, and the lamp lights brightly the newspapers I am fool enough to re-read, and the absurd books.

La vie est la farce à mener par tous.

Magical flowers were humming. The turf slopes cradled *him.* Beasts of a fabulous elegance were circulating. Storm clouds were piling up on the rising sea made of an eternity of hot tears.

Elle est retrouvée! -Quoi? -l'Éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil. Je devins un opéra fabuleux : je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité de bonheur : l'action n'est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse du cerveau. À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues. Ce monsieur ne sait pas ce qu'il fait : il est un ange.

Расчеты в сторону - и тогда неизбежно опускается небо; и визит воспоминаний и сеансы ритмов заполняют всю комнату, голову, разум.

Мир шагает вперед! Почему бы ему не вращаться?

...есть больше оснований восхищаться людьми, чем презирать их.

Il n'y a personne ici et il y a qeulqu'un: je ne voudrais pas répandre mon trésor.

Cuando yo haya realizado todos tus recuerdos ━cuando sea quien sabe sujetarte━ te ahogaré

Tenemos fe en el veneno. Sabemos dar nuestra vida entera, todos los días. He aquí el tiempo de los asesinos.

how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.

I’m the Saint praying on a balcony - like peaceful beasts grazing along the Sea of Palestine. I’m the scholar in a plain reading chair. Branches and rain beat the library windows. I’m the pedestrian on the high road through the stunted woods; the sound of floodgates drowns out my footsteps. I stare at the melancholy wash of another golden sunset... The path is harsh. The hillocks are weed. The air is still. How far we are from birds and streams. The end of the world must be just ahead.

Yo es otro.

Man's labors! Explosions that, from time to time, illuminate my abyss.

Children's laughter marks both beginning and end. This poison lingers in our veins even when we withdraw to the silence of prior discord.

This instant of awakening has conjured a vision of purity! The spirit leads us to God! Bitter misfortune!

Le monde n'a pas d'âge. L'humanité se déplace, simplement. (The world has no age. Humanity simply changes place.)

I might be the child abandoned on the wharf setting out for the high seas, or the farmhand, following the path whose top reaches the sky.

It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.

And think of me. It’s worth the loss of the world. I’m lucky to see my suffering ended. Alas: my life was little more than a few mild madnesses.

To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that's the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault.

The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, entire. He searches his soul, he inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it.

I stare at the melancholy wash of another golden sunset... The path is harsh. The hillocks are weed. The air is still. How far we are from birds and streams. The end of the world must be just ahead.

Rimbaud held the keys to a mystical language that I devoured even as I could not fully decipher it. My unrequited love for him was as real to me as anything I had experienced. At the factory where I had labored with a hard-edged, illiterate group of women, I was harassed in his name. Suspecting me of being a Communist for reading a book in a foreign language, they threatened me in the john, prodding me to denounce him. It was within this atmosphere that I seethed. It was for him that I wrote and dreamed. He became my archangel, delivering me from the mundane horrors of factory life. His hands had chiseled a manual of heaven and I held them fast. The knowledge of him added swagger to my step and this could not be stripped away. I tossed my copy of Illuminations in a plaid suitcase. We would escape together.

Uyanık geçen geceler I Işıklı bir dinleniş bu, ne hararet ne bitkinlik, yatağın üzerinde veya çayırların üstünde. Dost bu, ne ateşli ne zayıf. Dost. Sevgili bu, ne acı veren ne acı çeken. Sevgili. Hiç aranmamış hava ve dünya. Hayat. -Demek bu muydu? -Ve rüya şiddetleniyor

I explained my magical sophisms with hallucinations of words! I ended up believing my spiritual disorder sacred. I was lazy, proof of my fever: I envied the happiness of animals—caterpillars, symbolic of the innocence of limbo; moles, virginity’s sleep! I grew bitter. I said farewell to the world in a ballad.

I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a questioning of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one has to be strong, one has to be born a poet, and I know I am a poet.

O vento Sul me fez lembrar miseráveis incidentes de infância, meus desesperos de verão, a horrível quantidade de força e de ciência que o destino sempre afastou de mim. Não! não passaremos o verão neste país mesquinho onde nada mais seremos que noivos órfãos. Quero que este braço teso não arraste mais uma imagem querida.

When I was very young, I admired hardened criminals locked behind prison doors; I visited inns and taverns they frequented; with their eyes, I saw the blue sky and the blossoming work of the fields; I tracked their scent through cities. They were more powerful than saints, more prudent than explorers—and they, they alone, were witnesses to glory and reason!

From castles of bone unknown music comes But now, that toil rewarded; you, your calculations, ––you, your fits of impatience––are no more than your dancing and your voice, not fixed and certainly not forced, although an added reason for a double consequence of inventiveness + success, ––in brotherly and discreet humanity throughout the universe devoid of images;––force and justice reflect the dancing and the voices which are only now esteemed. The voices of instruction in exile... The body’s ingenuousness bit- terly put in its place... –– Adagio –– Ah! the infinite egotism of adolescence, the studious optimism: how full of flowers the world was that summer! Tunes and forms fading... ––A choir, to calm down impotence and absence! A choir of glass pieces, of nocturnal melodies... Soon, indeed, the nerves will slip their moorings.

But orgies and womanly companionship were denied me. Not one friend. I saw myself in front of an angry mob, facing a firing squad, weeping incomprehensible sorrows and forgiving them, like Joan of Arc: “Priests, professors, masters: you falter bringing me to justice. I was never one of you; I was never Christian; my race sang upon the rack; I don’t understand your laws; I have no moral compass, I’m a beast: you falter …

On the roads, through winter nights, without a home, without habits, without bread, a voice strangled my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: Those are your options, so strength it is. You know neither where you’re going, nor why you’re going, entering anywhere, answering anyone. You’re no more likely to be killed than a corpse.” By morning, I had developed such a lost, dead expression that those I met may not have even seen me.

On the roads, through winter nights, without a home, without habits, without bread, a voice strangled my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: Those are your options, so strength it is. You know neither where you’re going, nor why you’re going, entering anywhere, answering anyone. You’re no more likely to be killed than a corpse.” By morning, I had developed such a lost, dead expression that those I met may not have even seen me.

I am the saint in prayer on the terrace like the peaceful animals that graze as far as the sea of Palestine. I am the scholar in his dark armchair. Branches and rain beat against the library window. I am the wanderer along the main road running through the dwarfish woods. The noise of the sluices drowns my footsteps. For a long time I can see the sad golden wash of the sunset. I might be the child abandoned on the wharf setting out for the high seas, or the farmhand, following the path whose top reaches the sky. The pathways are rough. The slopes are covered with broom. The air is still. How far away are the birds and the springs of water! This must be the end of the world, lying ahead.

Madness—the kind you lock away—breeds sophistries, and I haven’t avoided a single one. I could list them all: I’ve got them down. My health suffered. Terror struck. I’d sleep for days, and, risen, such sad dreams would stay with me. I was ripe for death, and down a dangerous road my weakness drew me to the edges of the earth and on to Cimmeria, that dark country of winds. I sought voyages, to disperse enchantments that had colonized my mind. Above a sea I came to love as if it were rinsing me of stain, I watched a consoling cross rise. Damnation, in the shape of a rainbow. Bliss was my undoing, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too ungovernable to devote to strength and beauty.

CHILDHOOD I That idol, black eyes and yellow mop, without parents or court, nobler than Mexican and Flemish fables; his domain, insolent azure and verdure, runs over beaches called by the shipless waves, names ferociously Greek, Slav, Celt. At the border of the forest—dream flowers tinkle, flash, and flare,—the girl with orange lips, knees crossed in the clear flood that gushes from the fields, nakedness shaded, traversed, dressed by rainbow, flora, sea. Ladies who stroll on terraces adjacent to the sea; baby girls and giantesses, superb blacks in the verdigris moss, jewels upright on the rich ground of groves and little thawed gardens,—young mothers and big sisters with eyes full of pilgrimages, sultanas, princesses tyrannical of costume and carriage, little foreign misses and young ladies gently unhappy. What boredom, the hour of the “dear body” and “dear heart.” II

I can’t remember any further back than this place on earth and Christendom. I never tire of seeing myself in that past. But always alone; without family. Even so, what language did I speak? I never see myself among the counselors of Christ; nor in the councils of the Lordly—representatives of Christ. What was I in the last century? I don’t find myself again until today. No more vagabonds, no more vague wars. The subordinate race has spread everywhere—we the people, it’s called, rationality; nationality and science. Oh! Science! Everything’s been made over. For your body and soul—the last rites—here’s medicine and philosophy—old wives’ remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the diversions of princes and the games that they prohibited! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! . . . Science! the latest aristocracy! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it make a turn? This is the vision of harmony. We’re headed for the Spirit. That’s for sure, it’s an oracle, I’m telling you. I understand it, and unable to explain myself without heathen speech, I’d rather keep silent.

One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. —And I found her bitter. —And I hurt her. I took arms against justice. I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate. I snuffed any hint of human hope from my consciousness. I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it. Dying, I called out to my executioners so I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called plagues to suffocate me with sand, blood. Misfortune was my god. I wallowed in the mud. I withered in criminal air. And I even tricked madness more than once. And spring gave me an idiot’s unbearable laughter. Just now, having nearly reached death’s door, I even considered seeking the key to the old feast, through which, perhaps, I might regain my appetite. [...] “A hyena you’ll remain, etc.… ” cries the demon that crowns me with merry poppies. “Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin.” Ah. It seems I have too many already: —But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way, and while you await a few belated cowardices—you who so appreciate a writer’s inability to describe or inform—I’ll tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.

Hawthorne was able to say of Melville that, as an unbeliever, he was extremely uneasy in his unbelief. It can equally well be said of the poets who rushed to assault the heavens, with the intent of turning everything upside down, that by so doing they affirmed their desperate nostalgia for order. As an ultimate contradiction, they wanted to extract reason from unreason and to systematize the irrational. These heirs of romanticism claimed to make poetry exemplary and to find, in its most harrowing aspects, the real way of life. They deified blasphemy and transformed poetry into experience and into a means of action. Until their time those who claimed to influence men and events, at least in the Occident, did so in the name of rational rules. On the contrary, surrealism, after Rimbaud, wanted to find constructive rules in insanity and destruction. Rimbaud, through his work and only through his work, pointed out the path, but with the blinding, momentary illumination of a flash of lightning. Surrealism excavated this path and codified its discoveries. By its excesses as well as by its retreats, it gave the last and most magnificent expression to a practical theory of irrational rebellion at the very same time when, on another path, rebellious thought was founding the cult of absolute reason. Lautreamont and Rimbaud—its sources of inspiration—demonstrate by what stages the irrational desire to accept appearances can lead the rebel to adopt courses of action completely destructive to freedom

AFTER THE DELUGE AS SOON as the idea of the Deluge had subsided, A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flower-bells, and said a prayer to the rainbow, through the spider’s web. Oh! the precious stones that began to hide,—and the flowers that already looked around. In the dirty main street, stalls were set up and boats were hauled toward the sea, high tiered as in old prints. Blood flowed at Blue Beard’s,—through slaughterhouses, in circuses, where the windows were blanched by God’s seal. Blood and milk flowed. Beavers built. “Mazagrans” smoked in the little bars. In the big glass house, still dripping, children in mourning looked at the marvelous pictures. A door banged; and in the village square the little boy waved his arms, understood by weather vanes and cocks on steeples everywhere, in the bursting shower. Madame *** installed a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral. Caravans set out. And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and of the polar night. Ever after the moon heard jackals howling across the deserts of thyme, and eclogues in wooden shoes growling in the orchard. Then in the violet and budding forest, Eucharis told me it was spring. Gush, pond,—Foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods;—black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll;—waters and sorrows rise and launch the Floods again. For since they have been dissipated—oh! the precious stones being buried and the opened flowers!—it’s unbearable! and the Queen, the Witch who lights her fire in the earthen pot will never tell us what she knows, and what we do not know.

বানভাসির পর ইল্যুমিনেশান ১ বানভাসির ধারনা শেষ হবার পরই, একটা খোরগোশ গোরুর গোয়ালে আর দুলতেথাকা ফুলগাছের কাছে থমকে দাঁড়িয়ে, মাকড়সার জালের ভেতর দিয়ে রামধনুকে প্রার্থনা শোনালো। ওহ ! যে দামি পাথরগুলো লুকিয়ে রেখেছিল, -- ফুলগুলো নিজেদের চারিধারে তাকিয়ে দেখছিল। নোংরা রাজপথে দোকান বসেছিল, তারা নৌকোগুলোকে টেনে নিয়ে গেল পরতে-পরতে ফুলে ওঠা সমুদ্রের ঢেউয়ে ঠিক যেমন পুরোনো ছবিগুলোতে দেখা যায় । যে নীলদাড়ি লোকটা নিজের বউগুলোকে একের পর এক মেরে ফেলতো, তার বাড়িতে রক্ত বইতে লাগল --- সারকাসের কসাইখানায় ঈশ্বরের প্রতিজ্ঞা শাদা করে তুলছিল জানালাগুলোকে। রক্ত আর দুধ বইছিল । ভোঁদোড়েরা গড়েছিল । শুঁড়িখানায় কফির পেয়ালায় উঠছিল ধোঁয়া । চারাগাছের বিশাল কাচঘরে জলফোঁটা ঝরছিল তখনও, সুন্দর ছবিগুলোর দিকে চেয়েছিল শোকাতুর শিশুরা । দরোজার পাল্লার আওয়াজ, আর, গ্রামের সবুজে, এক খোকা দুই হাত নাড়ালো, বেগবান ঝর্ণার তলায়, সব জায়গাকার ঘণ্টাঘরের হাওয়ামোরগ আর আবহাওয়া নির্দেশকগুলো তা টের পাচ্ছিল। ম্যাডাম অমুক আল্পস পাহাড়ে একটা পিয়ানো বসালেন । গির্জার একশো হাজার বেদির ওপরে উদযাপন করা হচ্ছিল খ্রিস্টের নৈশভোজনোৎসব-পর্ব আর প্রথম ধর্মসংস্কার । চলে গেল মরুযাত্রীদল । আর বরফ ও মেরুরাত্রির বিশৃঙ্খলায় তৈরি করা হলো দীপ্তিশীল হোটেল। তারপর থেকে, সুগন্ধগুল্মের মরুভূমিতে শেয়ালের ডাক শুনতে পেল চাঁদ -- আর ফলবাগানে কাঠের জুতো পরে চারণকবিতাদের অসন্তুষ্ট বিড়বিড়ানি । তারপর, থইথই বেগনি জঙ্গলে, বনানীর উপদেবী আমাকে বললো যে এটা বসন্তঋতু । ঝিলপুকুর, ফুলে ওঠো : ফেনায়িত হও, সাঁকোর ওপর আর গাছের তলা দিয়ে গড়িয়ে চলে যাও: -- কালো ঝালর আর অবয়ব -- বজ্র ও বিদ্যুৎ উঠে দাঁড়াও আর ঝাঁপাও : -- জল এবং দুঃখ ওঠো আর আরেকবার বানভাসিকে তুলে আনো । জল নেমে গিয়েছিল বলে -- ওহ, দামি পাথরগুলো নিজেরা চাপা পড়ে গিয়েছিল আর ফুটে ওঠা ফুলের দল ! -- তা বড়োই ক্লান্তিকর ! আর সেই ডাকিনী রানি, যিনি পৃথিবীর মাটি দিয়ে তৈরি পাত্রে আগুন জ্বালান, কখনও বলবেন না তিনি যা জানেন, আর আমরা কোন ব্যাপারে অবিদিত।

I had to travel, to distract the enchantments gathered in my brain. Over the sea, that I loved as if she’d wash me clean of stain, I saw the cross of consolation rise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would be forever too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty. O Happiness! its tooth, killing sweetly, warned me at cock-crow,

But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminations were translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us. In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.

RÉPONSES INTERROGATIVES À UNE QUESTION DE MARTIN HEIDEGGER La poésie ne rythmera plus l'action. Elle sera en avant. RIMBAUD. Divers sens étroits pourraient être proposés, compte non tenu du sens qui se crée dans le mouvement même de toute poésie objective, toujours en chemin vers le point qui signe sa justification et clôt son existence, à l'écart, en avant de l'existence du mot Dieu : -La poésie entraînera à vue l'action, se plaçant en avant d'elle. L'en-avant suppose toutefois un alignement d'angle de la poésie sur l'action, comme un véhicule pilote aspire à courte distance par sa vitesse un second véhicule qui le suit. Il lui ouvre la voie, contient sa dispersion, le nourrit de sa lancée. -La poésie, sur-cerveau de l’action, telle la pensée qui commande au corps de l'univers, comme l'imagination visionnaire fournit l'image de ce qui sera à l'esprit forgeur qui la sollicite. De là, l'enavant. -La poésie sera « un chant de départ ». Poésie et action, vases obstinément communicants. La poésie, pointe de flèche supposant l'arc action, l'objet sujet étroitement dépendant, la flèche étant projetée au loin et ne retombant pas car l'arc qui la suit la ressaisira avant chute, les deux égaux bien qu'inégaux, dans un double et unique mouvement de rejonction. -L'action accompagnera la poésie par une admirable fatalité, la réfraction de la seconde dans le miroir brûlant et brouillé de la première produisant une contradiction et communiquant le signe plus (+) à la matière abrupte de l’action. -La poésie, du fait de la parole même, est toujours mise par la pensée en avant de l'agir dont elle emmène le contenu imparfait en une course perpétuelle vie-mort-vie. -L'action est aveugle, c'est la poésie qui voit. L'une est unie par un lien mère-fils à 1'autre, le fils en avant de la mère et la guidant par nécessité plus que par amour. -La libre détermination de la poésie semble lui conférer sa qualité conductrice. Elle serait un être action, en avant de Faction. -La poésie est la loi, l'action demeure le phénomène. L'éclair précède le tonnerre, illuminant de haut en bas son théâtre, lui donnant valeur instantanée. -La poésie est le mouvement pur ordonnant le mouvement général. Elle enseigne le pays en se décalant. -La poésie ne rythme plus l'action, elle se porte en avant pour lui indiquer le chemin mobile. C'est pourquoi la poésie touche la première. Elle songe l'action et, grâce à son matériau, construit la Maison, mais jamais une fois pour toutes. _ La poésie est le moi en avant de l'en soi, « le poète étant chargé de l'Humanité » (Rimbaud). - La poésie serait de « la pensée chantée ». Elle serait l'œuvre en avant de Faction, serait sa conséquence finale et détachée. -La poésie est une tête chercheuse. L'action est son corps. Accomplissant une révolution ils font, au terme de celle-ci, coïncider la fin et le commencement. Ainsi de suite selon le cercle. -Dans l'optique de Rimbaud et de la Commune, la poésie ne servira plus la bourgeoisie, ne la rythmera plus. Elle sera en avant, la bourgeoisie ici supposée action de conquête. La poésie sera alors sa propre maîtresse, étant maîtresse de sa révolution; le signal du départ donné, l'action en-vue-de se transformant sans cesse en action voyant.

(...) Chez Rimbaud la diction précède d’un adieu la contradiction. Sa découverte, sa date incendiaire, c’est la rapidité. L’empressement de sa parole, son étendue épousent et couvrent une surface que le verbe jusqu’à lui n’avait jamais atteinte ni occupée. En poésie on n’habite que le lieu que l’on quitte, on ne crée que l’oeuvre dont on se détache, on n’obtient la durée qu’en détruisant le temps. Mais tout ce qu’on obtient par rupture, détachement et négation, on ne l’obtient que pour autrui. La prison se referme aussitôt sur l’évadé. Le donneur de liberté n’est libre que dans les autres. Le poète ne jouit que de la liberté des autres. À l’intérieur d’un poème de Rimbaud, chaque strophe, chaque verset, chaque phrase vit d’une vie poétique autonome. Dans le poème Génie, il s’est décrit comme dans nul autre poème. C’est en nous donnant congé, en effet, qu’il conclut. Comme Nietzsche, comme Lautréamont, après avoir tout exigé de nous, il nous demande de le « renvoyer ». Dernière et essentielle exigence. Lui qui ne s’est satisfait de rien, comment pourrions-nous nous satisfaire de lui ? Sa marche ne connaît qu’un terme : la mort, qui n’est une grande affaire que de ce côté-ci. Elle le recueillera après des souffrances physiques aussi incroyables que les illuminations de son adolescence. Mais sa rude mère ne l’avait-elle pas mis au monde dans un berceau outrecuidant entouré de vigiles semblables à des vipéreaux avides de chaleur. Ils s’étaient si bien saisis de lui qu’ils l’accompagnèrent jusqu’à la fin, ne le lâchant que sur le sol de son tombeau.