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— dated 15 May 1871 and addressed to Paul Demeny — by cutting history down to size, reducing the redoubtable forest to firewood. With a smack of justifiably imperious condescension he announces:
     
    ... All ancient poetry culminated in the Greek, harmonious Life. — From Greece to the romantic movement — in the Middle Ages — there are writers, and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations. Racine alone is pure, strong, great. — If his rhymes had been liquidated, and his hemistiches mixed up, today the Divine Fool would be as little known as any old author of Origins. — After Racine, the game gets rusty. It has been going on for two thousand years!
     
    Whether or not Rimbaud had read the authors he quotes, his assumptions ring vitally true. Dead poetry, fossil poetry, Racine’ s mechanical couplets, Rimbaud saw that all these things remained an impediment to poetic progress. Lacking inner dynamism and a conflict worked out through the opposition of irreconcilables, most poetry by the mid-nineteenth century had devolved into ‘rhymed prose’, in the manner that most of the bad poetry written today goes under the banner of free verse, while it is in fact prose arbitrarily truncated to make the line lengths appear to conform to poetic structure. Rimbaud is not only intent on shocking, but he is deadly serious in his aim to invent a new poetics, something he was to achieve in the prose poems of Les Illuminations , and in much of the writing that makes up Une saison en enfer.
                  One can imagine Rimbaud spitting in the process of writing this last letter. His thoughts raced too fast. It was hot, and he was probably uncomfortable in his dirty clothes. What could his mother have to do with this? She wouldn’t have understood a line. His potential was suddenly before him; it moved jerkily like a series of film stills not yet edited into a sequence. The part of his mind not concentrating on the page was probably devising ways of getting drinks in the local Cafés. His friend Bretagne would see to that later. When he takes the letter up again it is to attack those for whom writing is an ego-dominated experience:
     
    ‘If those old idiots had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we shouldn’t have to sweep away the millions of skeletons which, since time immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intelligence, by claiming to be the authors!’
     
                  Before arriving at the inspired prescriptions necessary for the poet to become a visionary, an inhabitant of the great dream, Rimbaud cleans the past like a fish. Men are still awaiting the arrival of a poet. ‘Pen-pushers, civil servants: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!’ Even Baudelaire, whom Rimbaud called ‘king of poets’, had advanced and withdrawn from the edge. Rimbaud, like an astrophysicist in the twentieth century, was about to release the blueprints for ecstatic mental flight. The dervish, the shaman, the assassin intoxicated by hashish, would have understood his demands. It is right to be ‘monstrous’ he asserts: ‘Think of a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.’ His assertions are unequivocal.
     
    The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and systematized derangement of all the senses . All forms of love, suffering, and madness; he searches himself, he consumes all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessence. Unspeakable torture in which he needs self-conviction and super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great outlaw — and the Wise Man! — Because he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He reaches the unknown, and even if, demented, he ends up losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has