![]() ![]() Reading John Clare, Ashbery experiences a version of the “simultaneity” that impacts him so forcefully in reading Rimbaud. And it is the poems written during Clare’s asylum years, at High Beech and then at Northborough, that represent Clare’s greatest literary accomplishment, a poetic modernity that Ashbery calls, “a kind of nakedness of vision.” Then (more interesting to Ashbery), he started to go off the deep end, finding himself institutionalized at the High Beech asylum for the first time in 1837. Clare wrote some reasonably good poetry in the early part of the 19th century. Speaking of Rimbaud, Ashbery says, “absolute modernity was for him the acknowledging of the simultaneity of all of life, the condition that nourishes poetry at every second.” And that is all Ashbery tells us before launching into his translation of the poetry of Rimbaud.Īshbery did, though, write more expansively on this idea in a lecture he gave about the relatively obscure 19th-century English poet John Clare. What, then, is this force of the absolutely modern that spoke through Rimbaud and that made its uncompromising demands on the rest of us? For Ashbery, it is a flattening out and accessibility of all things, all experiences. Ashbery even gives the greater force a name in the preface to his translation of Illuminations: “absolutely modern.” “If we are absolutely modern - ,” writes Ashbery, “and we are - it’s because Rimbaud commanded us to be.” ![]() That is, actually, pretty close to what John Ashbery thinks. Verse of such raw power spilled out of him at such a young age, and in the midst of such terrible behavior, that it is difficult not to think he was merely the vessel, the cipher for some greater force. If Ion was touched, then Rimbaud was grabbed and well-nigh throttled. Since we have no idea where it comes from or what it means, practitioners of poetry and poetic recitation must either be dishonest or divinely touched. ![]() In the end, Ion decides, with much help from Socrates, that poetry is a divine madness that no one really understands. In that dialogue, Socrates takes a young rhetor (one of the traveling performers who recited the epics of Homer at public gatherings in ancient Greece) through a typically devastating analysis of the rhetorical craft. Plato was already complaining about this 2,500 years ago in his dialogue Ion. It impacts us in a way that cannot, by its nature, be discussed in any clear manner, which frustrates us and kicks up all manner of paradox. Perhaps that is the problem with poetry in general. It is difficult to explain what happens when reading Rimbaud since the very act of explanation is an attempt to translate the poetry from a non-intellectual into an intellectual framework. It doesn’t enter the mind so much as it finds a way directly into the nervous system, the heart, the soul. His poetry will not be understood either. In short, it is very difficult to sympathize with or even understand Rimbaud as a human being. He schemed and cheated and tricked his way through those brutal experiences and then he died. He would live into early middle age as a traveler in the colonial world. He had lived a few short years as a selfish and monstrous poet and that was the end of his writing career. I say fiery because that is what Rimbaud’s writing does, it burns. ![]() The poems are no less fiery today than when he first wrote them. He’d written a handful of poems and some prose. They were living in filth and violence at the fringes of society, all in the name of a greater poetic truth. Rimbaud and Verlaine were engaged in a drink- and drug-filled binge that drove them both to the edge of sanity. Verlaine was just getting out of prison, having been put there for shooting at Rimbaud with a revolver, hitting him once in the hand. Rimbaud gave them to his lover, the Decadent poet Verlaine, before leaving Europe on journeys that took him through the next two decades and to his death. The poems of Illuminations barely made it into the world. Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by John Asbery. ![]()
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