Arthur Rimbaud

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

My wisdom is as spurned as chaos. What is my nothingness, compared to the amazement that awaits you?

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

The poet, therefore, is truly the thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it has none, he gives it none. A language must be found…of the soul, for the soul and will include everything: perfumes, sounds colors, thought grappling with thought

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

I am alone in possessing a key to this barbarous sideshow.

It was the voice of mad seas, roaring immense,/ That shattered your infant breast, too soft, too human.

As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

A man who wants to mutilate himself is certainly damned, isn't he?

The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Hay que ser absolutamente Moderno

And I am still alive-what though, my damnation is eternal. A man who deliberately mutilates himself is truly damned, is he not? I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am.