Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel Book

"In order to become a true poet, Rimbaud wrote, the writer must turn himself into a seer. 'The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense and carefully reasoned disordering of all the senses.' The poet must subject himself to a self-instigated torture; he must undergo all the agonies of love, suffering and madness. 'He needs all his faith, all his superhuman force, and he will become the great sick man, the great criminal, the great cursed sinner-and the supreme Wise Man, since he'll have reached the Unkown" (pg 51).

"Je est un autre, which meant that in the act of introspection we objectify the self, we experience our self as if it belongs to another person. In the act of introspection there is an observer and there is an observed-and the observed half of the ego feels distant, alien. This much seems obvious to me: I am present at the explosion of my thought. I watch and listen to it. I wave the baton; the symphony murmurs form its depths or comes leaping onto the stage."
(pg 50)

"The goal of poetry is the Beautiful and the Beautiful alone without any reference to the Useful, the True or the Just" -Verlaine

We all have a house of the knives and the herring.

Relationships have all been bad, mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's. -Bob Dylan