“If brass wakes up as a bugle, it is not its fault.”

Original: Si le cuivre s’éveille clairon, il n’y a rien de sa faute. — The metaphor presents the poet as an instrument through which something beyond conscious intention finds expression. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Consciousness
• Creation
• Poetry

“The poet would make himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned disordering of all the senses.”

Original: Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. — Poetic vision requires a sustained challenge to ordinary habits of perception. · Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 (French)

• Poetry
• Senses
• Vision

“Aden is, as everyone admits, the most boring place in the world, after the one where you live.”

Original: Aden qui est, tout le monde le reconnaît, le lieu le plus ennuyeux du monde, après toutefois celui que vous habitez. — Rimbaud turns his frustration with Aden into a characteristically dry joke at his family’s expense. · Letter to his family from Aden, 22 September 1880 (French)

• Boredom
• Humour
• Place