The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud by Henry Miller Page A

infinitude of spirit. It is through this inner register that the man without language, so to speak, is in communication with the poet. There is no question of verbal education involved but one of spiritual development. The purity of Rimbaud is nowhere more apparent than in this uncompromising pitch which he maintained throughout his work. He is understood by the most diverse types, as well as misunderstood by the most diverse types. His imitators can be detected immediately. He has nothing in common with the school of symbolists. Nor has he anything in common with the surrealists, as far as I can see. He is the father of many schools and the parent of none. It is his unique use of the symbol which is the warrant of his genius. This symbology was forged in blood and anguish. It was at once a protest and a circumvention of the dismal spread of knowledge which threatened to stifle the source of the spirit. It was also a window opening upon a world of vastly more complex relations for which the old sign language no longer served. Here he is closer to the mathematician and the scientist than to the poet of our time. Unlike our latter-day poets, be it noted, he did
not
make use of the symbols used by the mathematician and the scientists. His language is the language of the spirit, not of weights, measures and abstract relations. In this alone he revealed how absolutely “modern” he was.
    Here I should like to amplify a point I touched on earlier, the matter of communication between poet and audience. In applauding Rimbaud’s use of the symbol I mean to emphasize that in this direction lies the true trend of the poet. There is a vast difference, in my mind, between the use of a more symbolic script and the use of a more highly personal jargon which I referred to as “gibberish.” The modern poet seems to turn his back on his audience, as if he held it in contempt. In self-defense he will sometimes liken himself to the mathematician or the physicist who has now come to employ a sign language wholly beyond the comprehension of most educated people, an esoteric language understandable only to the members of his own cult. He seems to forget that he has a totally different function than these men who deal with the physical or the abstract world. His medium is the spirit and his relation to the world of men and women is a vital one. His language is not for the laboratory but for the recesses of the heart. If he renounces the power to move us his medium becomes worthless. The place of renewal is the heart, and there the poet must anchor himself. The scientist, on the other hand, is utterly concerned with the world of illusion, the physical world in which things are
made to happen
. He is already a victim of the powers he once hoped to exploit. His day is coming to a close. The poet will never quite find himself in this position. He would not be a poet in the first place if his instinct for life were as perverted as the scientist’s. But the danger which menaces him is the abrogation of his powers; by betraying his trust he is surrendering the destinies of countless human beings to the control of worldly individuals whose sole aim is their own personal aggrandizement. The abdication of Rimbaud is of another caliber from the self-liquidation of the contemporary poet. Rimbaud refused to become something other than he was, in his office as poet, in order to survive. Our poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibility of their office. They have not
proved
themselves poets; they are content simply to call themselves such. They are writing not for a world which hangs on their every word but for one another. They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible. They are locked in their glorified little egos; they hold themselves aloof from the world for fear of being shattered at the first contact. They are not even personal, when one gets right down to it, for if they were we might