The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Oppen / Rimbaud

274 Oppen/Rimbaud The Poet as Quitter apoet I admire once told me he was thinking of giving up poetry. The author of two well-received books, he certainly wasn’t failing as a poet, but for some reason he seemed to feel that poetry was failing him. He wasn’t being fired from Parnassus Industries : after establishing a successful career, he was thinking of drafting his letter of resignation. He wouldn’t be alone: Matthew Arnold, for example, gave up poetry for criticism, as did Paul Valéry for a time. Basil Bunting took a long hiatus from the art, and Laura Riding Jackson left it for good to concentrate on her prose. Reasons for resignation are as numerous as poets who resign, but the abandonment of poetry by a promising poet makes one wonder what drives a poet to give up his or her art—and what, if anything, could bring that poet home to poetry? * Arthur Rimbaud offers perhaps the most dramatic example of the poet who resigns from poetry. Having produced some of the most startling and original poetry in the French language during his adolescence, Rimbaud gave poetry up before his twentieth birthday, embarking on a series of exotic journeys and occupations and ending up as a moneyobsessed arms merchant in Ethiopia. Admirers of Rimbaud’s poetry quite understandably look upon his change of careers with sorrow. André 275 Poetry in a Difficult World Breton, for example, lamented the gun-running Rimbaud, calling him “un assez lamentable polichinelle”—“a pitiful clown” (Borer 337). How could the one-time enfant terrible of French verse so thoroughly break faith with his youthful self? To frame the matter in terms of Rimbaud’s betrayal of himself, though, is to beg the question. There is, after all, a meaningful sense in which Rimbaud’s pursuit of poetry and his pursuit of riches in Africa weren’t opposing actions, but manifestations of the same desire he’d felt from earliest childhood: the desire to rebel. It shouldn’t take away from our sense of Rimbaud’s accomplishments in poetry if we note that he was never, first and foremost, a poet pure and simple. The primary goal of Rimbaud’s life wasn’t poetry: it was rebellion, and his poetry was merely one embodiment of that rebellion. When Rimbaud lost faith in the power of poetry as a means of rebellion, he found other methods. He may well have betrayed poetry, but he never betrayed his own disposition . Of course Rimbaud’s was a special kind of rebellion, quite different from that of the more conventional social and political revolutionaries of nineteenth century Europe. Bertrand Russell, writing about another great poet-rebel, Lord Byron, draws a distinction useful for understanding Rimbaud. “The aristocratic rebel, of whom Lord Byron was in his day the exemplar, is a very different type from the leader of a peasant or proletarian revolt,” writes Russell. “Those who are hungry have no need of an elaborate philosophy to stimulate or excuse discontent,” since, for them, “the good is enough to eat, and the rest is talk” (747). In contrast, the rebellion of an aristocrat like Byron is an assertion of the unbending autonomy of the personality. Like Byron, Rimbaud was a rebel who gave a great shout of refusal. In one crucial respect, though, Rimbaud was unlike Byron—but very like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus. Byron, after all, was quite literally the aristocratic rebel, whereas Rimbaud came from provincial bourgeois stock. This meant that Rimbaud was subject to a regime of social, economic , and institutional norms that Byron was free to ignore: he must escape the same kind of nets cast in the flight-path of Joyce’s Dedalus when he tries to soar. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron attributed his 276 The Poet Resigns rebellious spirit to having been “untaught in youth my heart to tame” (135) but Rimbaud’s childhood was quite different: he was expected to tame his heart and submit to a regimented and repressive set of norms. Deferred gratification and prudent obedience to the norms of school, church, career, and family were the household gods worshipped around the Rimbaud family hearth. Rimbaud came to know these values from his parents, the glamorous but often absent Capitaine Frédéric Rimbaud, who campaigned with the French army in Algeria, and the smothering, money-conscious, all-too-present Madame Marie...