The Letter of the Seer

On May 15, 1871, in the provincial town of Charleville, a sixteen-year-old boy sat writing what would become one of literature's most revolutionary manifestos. Arthur Rimbaud, still wearing the student's uniform he despised, was composing his famous "Lettre du Voyant" (Letter of the Seer) to his former teacher, Paul Demeny. Outside, the French nation was tearing itself apart—the Commune falling in Paris, Versaillais troops executing thousands. Inside, Rimbaud was declaring war on poetry itself.

"I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer," he wrote, his pen racing across the page. "The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons, to keep only their quintessences."

This wasn't adolescent posturing. Rimbaud had already written poems that surpassed most poets' lifetime achievements. "The Drunken Boat," composed from a landlocked town by a boy who had never seen the ocean, created verbal seascapes more vivid than any sailor's memoir. But he wanted more than beautiful verses. He wanted to crack open language itself, to find thealchemy that would turn words into visions, to become a thief of fire who would steal illumination from the gods.

"I is another," he declared in the letter's most famous phrase. The grammatical violence was intentional. The unified self that lyric poetry celebrated was an illusion. True poetry would come from exploring the otherness within, the stranger who spoke through the poet's mouth. This required destroying the ego, burning away personality until only the visionary faculty remained.

As he signed the letter, Rimbaud felt the intoxication of absolute certainty. He would go to Paris, find poets who would understand, create the new poetry the new age demanded. Within four years, he would fulfill his program so completely that nothing remained but silence. The boy who wanted to reinvent poetry would succeed—and the success would destroy him. At twenty, he would stop writing forever, becoming a different kind of voyager in the African desert. But first, he would show the world visions it had never imagined.