Amit Majmudar - Rimbaud the Prodigy (Kenyon Review Blog) lyrics

We are used to mathematical prodigies—a Ramanujan, a Pascal, an Evariste Gaulois—leaping to some early, complete insight closed off to the merely talented or well-practiced. Musical prodigies, too, are well-documented; the most famous, of course, is Mozart, but he is hardly alone. Others pick at the lock of the sanctum; prodigies slip through the wall and arrive. In literature, the child or teenage prodigy is almost absent. We must say almost here because of one poet in particular, Arthur Rimbaud. I have studied Rimbaud's work with fascination for some time now, from his early Latin schoolboy exercises—mindblowing—to the wildly contained sonnets and stanzas of his teens. (His wildness, both personal and artistic, destroys the implicit American equation of unrhymed, nonmetrical verse and “freedom.”) I have asked myself, checking and rechecking the composition dates for his pieces: How is this possible? How did a bona fide poetic prodigy arise after centuries of there being no such thing? Rimbaud attained his precocity, it seems to me, through music. The young Rimbaud only seems to be composing French poems; he is actually composing music using French word-sounds as his instrument, and the grammatical rules of language and the forms of poetry as compositional elements, like harmony or counterpoint. For all their clarity of theme or tone—this one is about a boat, that one about hanged men—Rimbaud's poems hardly ever present a logical argument, character development, or narrative progression, such as you get in poets like Pope, Browning, or Frost. There is no paraphrasing the sense of Le Bateau Ivre, but there is a way to paraphrase the sense of “The Road Not Taken.” I do not place one kind of poetry or poet above the other for this reason, as some might; I point this out to suggest a difference in compositional principles. Poetry is, in many ways, a form that hybridizes poetry and music. Archival online issues of Poetry magazine from the 1930's seem utterly dated, but only in the poems; the prose at the back has aged better (former editor Christian Wiman, discussing his study of back issues for a centenary anthology, came away with this impression also). It is the music that gets old; popular music from the 1930's sounds old for the same reason. The prose criticism is more purely, bluntly language, and a language changes, as we all know, much more slowly than tastes in music. Rimbaud accomplishes his leaps of insight because Rimbaud, still in his teens, pushes poetry toward one of its two parent arts, music—the one that is more hospitable to the prodigy. His poems don't make sense like a poem by Tennyson because Tennyson is a musical poet, while Rimbaud is a linguistic musician. Still, he doesn't push poetry too far toward music. Consider Rimbaud's closest kin in contemporary America: The rapper. Here, too, words get used more as musical instruments than logical tools; rappers are, with their relentless rhyme strings, even closer to pure music than Rimbaud. Too close, in fact, to stand alone, without the beats and living voice. This is why Rimbaud's poems work on the page in a way that rap lyrics don't (cf. The Anthology of Rap, Yale University Press, 2011—any page at all). This is also why you can find teenaged rappers performing at a higher level, relative to other practitioners of their art, than any teenaged page-poet relative to other page-poets. Print poetry journals almost never publish anyone under 20, while more than one rap artist has been signed in their teens. This doesn't have to do with the exclusionary practices of the aging power brokers of the poetry business; it has to do with poetry itself, how formal-phonetic virtuosity–musical “virtue”–is not sufficient, by itself, to make a poem that reads well. Which means, I guess, that Rimbaud, recla**ified as a musical prodigy instead of a poetic one, is just as much a mystery to me as he was at the beginning of this essay. His flowering may have remained a mystery to him as well: Just as fascinating as his poetic output was the self-willed silence of his last years, when Rimbaud the poet-musician morphed into Rimbaud the gun-runner of Harrar. It is akin to Shakespeare turning, during his last three years of life, into the prosperous country gentleman of Stratford. In both cases, faced with such linguistic and musical effervescence, I do not know which is harder to explain: the poetry or the silence.