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one. Rimbaud lit a forest fire around them. His poetry singularly extinguished an entire century’s poetics, with the exception of Baudelaire, Nerval, Lautréamont and a little of Verlaine. Progress demands this sort of corrosive fury. Invention is contingent on disrespect. Rimbaud sensed with an unerringly sanguine instinct that literary movements owe their success to playing safe. The public want to be assured of their own psychological limitations; they want art to endorse a sense data that corresponds to the ordinary. Rimbaud knew he had the measure of such stupidity, even if the detonation rang true long after he had disowned an interest in poetry.
                  Rimbaud’s two letters, Lettres du voyant , no doubt written quickly and under pressure of immediate inspiration, are the beginnings of a new dawn of poetry. He announces the arrival of the assassins. These two letters, the second enlarging and expanding on the theories developed in the first, are of such profound significance that they could have altered both the course of poetry and the future of the race, if they had issued from the pen of someone other than an insignificant provincial schoolboy.
                  The first of the Lettres du voyant was written by Rimbaud to his former teacher, Georges Izambard, and is dated 13 May 1871. I have already quoted the parts which deal with the self-induced derangement of the senses as an initiatory rite to vision. But as important to this letter is the snarling contempt that Rimbaud reveals for his teacher’s concern that he should conform both in his poetry and in his professional life to the social dictates of respectability. Rimbaud launches his theory in opposition to Izambard’s bias towards safety. His tone is insolent, his manner menacing; he is already quite sure that the recipient of his letter will never take to the visionary impulse.
     
    ... Basically, all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in going back to the university trough — excuse me — proves it. But you will always end up self-satisfied without ever having done anything, because that was your wish. Not to mention that your subjective poetry will always be disgustingly insipid. One day, I hope — as many others do — I shall see objective poetry in your principle, and see it more sincerely than you! — I shall be a worker: that is the idea which constrains me when mad rage drives me towards the battle of Paris — where so many workers are dying as I write to you! Work now, never, never; I am on strike.
     
                  Rimbaud’s impatience with insipid poetry, his attack on the self-indulgent sentimentality or subjectivity of Izambard’s verse, becomes in the second letter a fulmination against ‘countless idiotic generations’. The ‘mad rage’ that Rimbaud describes as subverting his passion to become involved in the battle of Paris, was the furnacing chaos within him cooling to visionary lucidity. He is a ‘worker’ in the name of poetic vision. To have arrived at where one is in poetry entails mental aeons of unconscious activity. The atemporal functionings of the imagination, inheriting as it does archetypes, myth, reincarnational experience, and delivered in intermittent and blinding flashes, injected into Rimbaud at this time a visionary cosmogony quite disproportionate to his age and worldly knowledge. Poets who rely wholly on the acquisition of empirical data are those whose impetus dries up in a middle-age drought. Visionary poetry is inexhaustible, for it picks up on the rhythm of the cosmos. Meteors chase through the poet’s head.
                  It is in the second of the Lettres du voyant that Rimbaud offers his fullest and most impassioned commitment to an uncompromising poetic delirium. Written two days after the first letter, the beliefs he expresses have ignited in his nerves.
                  Rimbaud begins his letter