Poetry Criticism | Rimbaud, Arthur - John Simon (essay date September 1991)

John Simon (essay date September 1991)

SOURCE: Simon, John. “Rimbaud, the Anarchic Demiurge.” The New Criterion 10, no. 1 (September 1991): 61-74.

[In the following essay, Simon discusses Rimbaud's contributions to modern poetry and examines his influence on other writers.]

Arthur Rimbaud was the begetter of modern poetry. For it to come to pass, a Rimbaud was required. It did not have to be A. Rimbaud; it could have been a Rimbaud of some other name, in some other place. But in the event, it was this Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, born in Charleville in the Ardennes on October 20, 1854, and dead on November 10, 1891—in pain and wretchedness, with one leg and all his hopes amputated—that is the fountainhead of modern poetry as we know it. (There is also, to some extent, Stéphane Mallarmé, about whom later.) And he did it all before he fully grew up, after which he rejected literature, his own and everyone else's, forever.

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