Arthur Rimbaud

It is only now, eight years after I first heard the name, that I am able to see him clearly, to read him like a clairvoyant. Now I know how great his contribution, how terrible his tribulations. Now I understand the significance of his life and work - as much, that is, as once can say he understands the life and work of another. But what I see most clearly is how I miraculously escaped suffering the same vile fate.

Rimbaud experienced his great crisis when he was eighteen, at which moment in his life he had reached the edge of madness; from this point on his life is an unending desert. I reached mine at the age of thirty-six to thirty-seven, which is the age at which Rimbaud dies. From this point on, my life begins to blossom. Rimbaud turned from literature to life; I did the reverse. Rimbaud fled from the chimeras he had created; I embraced them. Sobered by the folly and waste of mere experience of life, I halted and converted my energies to creation. I plunged into writing with the same fervor and zest that I had plunged into life. Instead of losing life, I gained life; miracle after miracle occurred, every misfortune being transformed into a good account. Rimbaud, though plunging into a realm of incredible climates and landscapes, into a world of phantasy [sic] as strange and marvelous as his poems, became more and more bitter, taciturn, empty and sorrowful.

Rimbaud restored literature to life; I have endeavored to restore life to literature. In both of us the confessional quality is strong, the moral and spiritual preoccupation uppermost. The flair for language, for music rather than literature, is another trait in common. With him I have felt an underlying primitive nature which manifests itself in strange ways. Claudel styled Rimbaud "a mystic in the wild state." Nothing could describe him better. He did not "belong" - not anywhere. I have always had the same feeling about myself. The parallels are endless. I shall go into them in some detail, because in reading the biographies and the letters I saw these correspondences so clearly that I could not resist making note of them. I do not think I am unique in this respect; I think there are many Rimbauds in this world and that their number will increase in time. I think the Rimbaud type will displace, in the world to come, the Hamlet type and the Faustian type. The trend toward a deeper split. Until the old world dies out utterly, the "abnormal" individual will tend more and more to become the norm. The new man will find himself only when the warfare between the collectivity and the individual ceases. Then we shall see the human type in its fullness and splendor.

The preceding was taken from Henry M
Source: Henry Miller's THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS : A Study of Rimbaud (1949 New Directions Publishing, 163 pp). Miller has authored countless works, both essays and fiction including The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, The Books in My Life, Henry Miller on Writing, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder and Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.