Keats and Rimbaud
We are perennially fascinated by how poets transcend their early work, fulfill their potential and create great art. John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Wil- fred Owen and Sylvia Plath afford precious insights into the mysteries of creativity. This essay will explore the lives of the first two poets and the other two will follow in the next issue. Isolated and lonely, a prey to mel- ancholy and tormenting self-analysis, these doomed outsiders were driven by emotional turbulence, obsessed by morbid details and felt the need to suffer. All were threatened by imminent death and wrote with a desper- ate urgency; they knew they didn’t have much time left and died young. Keats died from tuberculosis; Rimbaud from a self-destructive retreat from civilization that ended with syphilis, cancer and the amputation of his leg; Owen from enemy fire in war; Plath from suicide. But intense pressure can sometimes be inspiring. As Samuel Johnson observed, ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ This mor- bid knowledge focused their minds and helped transform their feelings and ideas into poetry. Writing made it possible, suddenly and briefly, to conquer their psychological wounds. Cut off in their prime, they published very lit- tle in their lifetimes. Their tragic deaths enhanced their literary reputations and they received much greater posthumous recognition.
Keats (1795-1821)
Keats reached the height of his poetic genius and composed his five great odes – ‘To Psyche,’ ‘On Indolence,’ ‘On a Grecian Urn,’ ‘To a Nightingale’ and ‘On Melancholy’ – at the age of twenty-three in May 1819. The previ- ous month, a typical quatrain in his ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ contained archaisms, banalities and clichés:
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh’d full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
He had been working on the long, unfinished ‘Hyperion’ and the short, tightly constructed sonnets, but abandoned them to concentrate on the more expansive lyric form of the odes.
Three biographical elements influenced Keats’s change of mood, spurt of energy and natural flow of words. In June 1818 his younger brother, George, emigrated to America. He wrote that ‘George always stood be- tween me and any dealings with the world. Now I find I must buffet it – I must take my stand upon some vantage ground and begin to fight – I must choose between despair & Energy – I choose the latter.’ Without George’s financial and emotional support he was weaker and more vulnerable, but his brother’s absence also stimulated him to be more self-sufficient. In long letters to George he defined his important ideas, sense of identity and source of poetic inspiration. Keats felt ‘the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and Oppression,’ but thought there must be some reason for all this suffering and tried to understand why he in particular had to suffer. He believed that pain disciplined his mind and created his personal identity as a poet. In April 1819 he wrote George, ‘there may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.’
Keats had a great deal to sadden him. After George’s departure he nursed his youngest brother, Tom, who died of tuberculosis in December 1818. Aileen Ward described how ‘Keats returned to his long watch by Tom’s bedside, nursing him through chills and coughing fits, trying to calm him in spells of despair, reading to him in his comfortable hours, and keeping up as cheerful a front as he could …. The hourly contact with his dying brother forced on him a new and painful self-awareness and with it a still more painful sense of self-division’ from his apparent identity and his true self. Keats probably contracted the disease from his brother, whose tragic
fate foreshadowed his own. He was constantly threatened by the sure and certain knowledge that he would also be destroyed by consumption. This gave him the morbid, premature feeling of ‘the cold earth upon him’ well before his own death in Rome at the age of twenty-five.
Keats’s long expected and near fatal hemorrhage took place in February 1820, only nine months after he composed the great odes. With dramatic objectivity, he told Fanny Brawne, the girl he loved, ‘On the night I was taken ill when so violent a rush of blood came to my Lungs that I felt nearly suffocated – I assure you I felt it possible I might not survive and at that moment thought of nothing but you.’ Recalling his medical training, he added, ‘I know the colour of that blood – it is arterial blood – I cannot be deceived in that colour; that drop is my death warrant. I must die.’ In September 1820, just before his voyage to the warmer climate of Italy, he anticipated death as a relief from suffering while desperately clinging to the remnants of life: ‘I wish for death every day and night to deliver me from these pains, and then I wish death away, for death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing. Land and Sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.’ Pain was better than nothing because it made him feel alive.
Keats’s ineluctable fate both prevented his marriage to Fanny Brawne and made him eager to seize her love before it was too late. In May 1819 the teenaged Fanny was living with her family in the house next door to him in Wentworth Place (now Keats Grove) and he sometimes walked with her on Hampstead Heath. He idealized the beauty and wit of the rather shallow and self-absorbed girl, whom he called ‘silly, fashionable and strange.’ But that month he broke through the emotional barrier that had separated them and declared, ‘I never knew before, such a love as you have made me feel.’ Fanny was, undoubtedly, an attractive and inspiring presence.
Aware that he had reached a creative turning point, Keats told George that his ‘Ode to Psyche’ (and the odes that followed it) ‘is the first and the only one with which I have taken even moderate pains – I have for the most part dash’d off my lines in a hurry – This I have done leisurely – I think it reads the more richly for it and will I hope encourage me to write other things in even a more peaceable and healthy spirit.’ He also said, while try- ing to combine careful thought with the sudden rush of imaginative power, ‘if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.’ His new spring of poetry did come naturally that month, with a personal urgency and mysterious release of energy that miraculously transformed his deepest feelings into words. He reached aesthetic maturity through an intense exploration of himself; achieved a heightened intensity of emotion, thought and act; and was exalted when, with full-throated ease, he felt possessed by his daemons and truly inspired. His friend Charles Brown left a vivid account of how Keats composed ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ his supreme artistic achievement: ‘In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.’
Aileen Ward explained how the personal and poetic elements, especially his love for Fanny Brawne, coalesced into the long-awaited moment: ‘For these few weeks he stood at a point of perfect balance, confident in his abil- ity to meet the future, able to contemplate the past with calm, and rejoicing in the beauty of the season, the joy of an answered love, the delight of a mastered craft – the themes of the odes as well as his incentives to writing them.’ But Walter Jackson Bate, emphasizing the darker aspects, described how Keats’s fearful experience with death also permeated the poem: ‘The personal poignance is obvious enough: Keats’s constant exposure to death since the age of eight; the accumulated fatigue of the effort of the past four years; his uneasy feeling about his own future since he returned from Scot- land with the ‘‘haunting sore-throat.’’Add to all this his attempts to manage this inevitable preoccupation with death.’
As Keats transforms the living bird into a symbol of visionary art, the nightingale’s sweet song, like the poet’s lyrical voice, stands out bravely against the suffering of the world. The ode expresses his awareness of joy and sadness, pleasure and pain as inseparable aspects of human life. He portrays a state of intense aesthetic and imaginative feeling, the conflict between momentary sensation and permanent art, and identifies with the natural song that exists beyond the world of change. Keats begins by stress- ing his physical weakness and psychological depression – ‘My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense,’ where even intense pleasure can cause pain, and moves steadily, through a series of morbid images, toward death. He seeks escape from pain through drugs and wine, and hopes to fade into the nightingale’s gentler world where time can no longer destroy youth and beauty. In a moving allusion to the death of young Tom and to the leaden coins that are placed on the eyes of the dead, he writes:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
In the sixth stanza Keats finally confronts death, which becomes a kind of spiritual transcendence and symbol of desirable fulfillment that allows him to escape from the human world of infinite suffering:
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muséd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain –
To thy high requiem become a sod.
The poem ends with a melancholy awakening as Keats realizes that his poetical fancy can briefly propel him into the nightingale’s world, but can- not sustain him there. His heightened imagination transcends reality, but he must inevitably feel pain when the spell is broken: ‘Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do … Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?’ Bate asserts that Keats’s ‘productivity of the three and a half weeks … is difficult to parallel in the career of any modern writer.’ But there is, in fact, a similar surge of creative genius in the poetry of Rimbaud, Owen and Plath.
Rimbaud (1854-91)
Arthur Rimbaud’s sophistication, poetic talent and extraordinary ideas ex- emplify the mystery of genius. In a notorious and influential letter of May 15, 1871 to his publisher-friend Paul Demeny, the sixteen-year-old provin- cial high-school dropout boldly defined his vision that demanded an artifi- cially induced, self-destructive and deliberate derangement that would en- able the tormented, sacrificial, even insane artist to become a great creator:
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one ac- cursed – and the supreme Scholar! – Because he reaches the un- known! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things.
Rimbaud’s decision to derange the senses, including the most basic human emotions, seems willful and pathological, but was also rational and deliber- ate. He would take drink, drugs, even poison; he would endure unspeakable tortures, commit acts of violence, become a criminal, risk losing his poetic insights, even risk death. During his years with Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud put this mad programme into practice and, in the most intense emotional expe- rience of his life, sucked the eager Verlaine into his whirlpool of depravity. But Verlaine didn’t have to derange his senses to keep up with Rimbaud; he was already quite deranged when they first met.
As the younger Rimbaud dominated the weak-willed and besotted Ver- laine, he experienced poverty and rebellion, starvation and exhaustion, filth and debauchery, degradation and disease, violence and destruction, while heightening his chaotic state with hashish and absinthe. The visionary yet analytic poet, determined to grasp the unknown, joyfully ruined himself in order to escape from ordinary life, enter a higher reality and gain superhu- man poetical power. He survived by cultivating a spirit of revolt, and by pouring his anger and disgust into poetry.
Rimbaud began his torturous three year relationship with Paul Verlaine – poetic mentor, parent-substitute and lover – in 1871. Bored and penniless, he wrote to Verlaine, enclosing some of his poems. Instantly convinced of his genius, Verlaine invited him to leave home and live with him in Paris. Verlaine offered him exactly what he wanted: sufficient money, complete freedom, stimulating talk, artistic recognition, meetings with leading poets and useful contacts with editors. The critic W. H. Frohock called Rimbaud a deliberately boorish and disgusting ‘juvenile delinquent with deviated tastes and possibly homicidal tendencies …. He was openly and aggres- sively offensive even to the associates who had befriended him. He lived parasitically on his friends, absorbed as much absinthe as he could, ex- perimented with narcotics, tried to knife his companion, paraded his ho- mosexuality, and broke up Verlaine’s marriage.’ He was at once chummy and caustic, flattering and sadistic, dominant and degraded, exalted and depraved, faithful and treacherous, angelic and demonic, radiant and dis- gusting, tender and violent, sexy and revolting, inspiring and cruel.
The tumultuous relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine, the first open and defiant gay couple in literary history, ended in July 1873 when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and was sent to prison for two years. But the shooting in- cident in Brussels was more operatic than tragic. One bullet hit Rimbaud in the wrist, the other went into the wall of their hotel room. On hearing the shots Verlaine’s mother, anxiously on guard next door, clumsily tried to help Rimbaud, whose wrist was bleeding profusely. Dazed and out of control, Verlaine sobbed on the bed, recovered slightly, gave Rimbaud the revolver and told him to ‘unload it in my temple.’
Rimbaud’s escape from his domineering mother and from his dull and stu- pefying home town, Charleville in northeast France, his rebellion against fashionable Parisian poets, sado-masochistic friendship with Verlaine (where poetry was the most important thing after sex and drink), and rest- less travels to Belgium and England catalyzed his volcanic outburst of bril- liant poetry. Thomas Chatterton and Raymond Radiguet had much shorter lives, but were not as talented as Rimbaud. The lives of Keats, Owen and Plath were cut short, but they did not reach Rimbaud’s impressive achieve- ment while still in their teens. In one monstrous and miraculous year, from July 1872 to August 1873, Rimbaud wrote Illuminations and A Season in Hell. He began the latter in April 1873, while he was still entangled with Verlaine, and finished it in August, the month after he left him. His biog- rapher Enid Starkie wrote that in the prose poem, ‘the form best suited to his elliptical and hermetic style … Rimbaud reached the highest peak of originality.’
Rimbaud’s assertion that he’s ‘ripe for death’ and attempt to escape from human suffering recall the major themes of Keats. A Season in Hell also has the long rhapsodic lines and emotional sweep of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the megalomaniacal iconoclasm of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (Rimbaud also rejects morality as a ‘weakness of the brain’) and powerful affinities with Lautréamont’s Chants of Maldoror. Like Rimbaud, Lautréamont led a wretched existence, died miserably (at the age of twenty-three) and achieved posthumous fame. Both writers were determined to reject normal life and fulfill their own creative destiny. Both poems – rapturous, hallucinatory, satanic monologues – resemble the musings of a maniac and revel in the most repulsive and self-immolating behavior. One critic’s description of the Chants of Maldoror applies equally to A Season in Hell: ‘an amazing profusion of apostrophe and imagery, at once delirious, erotic, blasphemous, grandiose and horrific.’
Rimbaud’s confession and exorcism of a madman in hell – ‘I think I am in hell, and therefore I am’ – give a perverse twist to Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum, and echo Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it’ in Doctor Faustus and John Milton’s ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell’ in Paradise Lost. The poem expands the ideas in Rimbaud’s letter about the deliberate derangement of the senses as he ‘plays clever tricks on insanity,’ becomes the ‘master of hallucinations’ and looks on ‘the disorder of [his] mind as sacred.’ Wallowing in rage, debauchery and madness, he defiantly declares ‘I have no moral sense. I am a brute … a beast, a savage … burdened with vice that sank its roots of suffering at my side as early as the age of reason – and that rises to the sky, batters me, knocks me down, drags me after it.’ Declaring, ‘I am an outcast. I loathe my country,’ he pre- dicts with amazing accuracy, ‘I am leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. Lost climates will tan me. I will swim, trample the grass, and smoke. I will drink alcohol as strong as boiling metal’ and wander to the ends of the earth.
A Season in Hell, especially the section called ‘Delirium’ where Rimbaud portrays Verlaine as ‘The Foolish Virgin’ and himself as ‘The Infernal Bridegroom,’ parodies their homosexual life together as an unreal and per- verse form of marriage. He misleadingly characterizes himself as passive and innocent, and portrays Verlaine as the pathetic slave of the demon lover who torments and finally abandons him. In the poem the older poet says:
He was almost a child …. His mysteriously delicate feelings had seduced me. I forgot all my human duty to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world. I go where he goes. I have to. And often he flies into a rage at me, poor me. The Demon! He is a demon, you know. He is not a man …. Then he would recover his manners of a young mother, of an older sister. If he were less wild, he would be saved! But his tenderness too is mortal. I am a slave to him. – Oh! I am mad! …
We worked together in a state of joy. But after a penetrating caress, he would say: ‘It will seem strange to you, when I am not here any more – after all you have gone through. When you will no longer have my arms under your neck, and my heart to lay your head on, and my lips on your eyes. Because one day I will have to go off, very far off.
Rimbaud’s ‘late work’ was written in his late teens. He wrote his best poetry during his most turbulent times with Verlaine, and gave up writing just after their violent quarrel and final separation. Consistently perverse, Rimbaud renounced poetry at the age of twenty and at the height of his powers, and finished up with an Abyssinian mistress, a cancerous amputated leg and a prosthetic limb that didn’t work. His poems, like the powerful beacon of a lighthouse, briefly lit up the landscape before disappearing into the dark.