ABSTRACT
On 15 May 1871, an ambitious 16-year-old wrote a remarkable letter to Paul Démeny, a provincial schoolteacher tenuously connected to the leading lights of the Parisian literary establishment. This lettre du voyant, from the precocious and never less than immodest Arthur Rimbaud, set out the putative poet’s personal manifesto. At a time when French poetry, thanks to the legacy of Racine, Lamartine, Musset and the Parnassian school, was characterised by extreme rigidity of structure, syntax and metre, the young Rimbaud famously announced that the time was ripe for a free-flowing, impressionistic, fragmented, allusive, vivid, dreamlike, essentially mystical perspective. ‘The poet,’ as he so arrestingly put it, ‘makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses (dérèglement de tous les sens)’.
