Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Lettre de voyant (Letter of a Seer)

One of the great inspirations of the Surrealists was the life and work of Arthur Rimbaud.  He is considered to be one of the greatest of modern French poets, despite the fact that he wrote nothing after the age of 19.  A natural rebel, he threw himself into a systematic exploration of human experience, produced a body of poems that have remained an inspiration to virtually every subsequent generation of modernists, and then disappeared.  He is thought to have spent much of this time in Ethiopia involved in the illegal trade in firearms and, perhaps, in human slaves.  His intensity and his rejection of literature both had a great impact on the Surrealists.

     Below you will find an excerpt from Lettre de voyant (Letter of a Seer) that Rimbaud composed on May 15, 1871.

  I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.

A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses.  All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, and preserves their quintessences.  Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist!  For he attains the unknown!  Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone!  He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them!  So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable:  other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!

  . . . So the poet, therefore, is truly a thief of fire.

Arthur Rimbaud as a Teenager