"A Derangement of All the Senses"

During last night's discussion of Illuminations, Keith Cohen shared this fascinating excerpt from Ruth Franklin's "Arse Poetica," which appeared in the Nov. 9, 2003, issue of The New Yorker:

In May 1871, Rimbaud wrote the two letters that have come to be known as the "Lettres du Voyant" ("Seer Letters")—the only explicit statements of his poetic credo. The first, addressed to Izambard, begins by insulting the teacher's "dry-as-dust subjective poetry" and includes a singsong ditty that crudely depicts anal intercourse. "Right now, I'm encrapulating myself as much as possible," the sixteen-year-old wrote. (Mason here substitutes a cognate for Rimbaud's coinage "je m' encrapule," which actually makes the poet sound overly scatological; others have translated it as "making myself scummy" or "lousing myself up.") "Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working to turn myself into a seer....It has to do with making your way toward the unknown by a derangement of all the senses ....I is someone else" ("Je est un autre"). The second letter, sent to Izambard's friend Paul Demeny, repeats and elaborates on the soon-to-be-famous pronouncement. "The first task of any man who would be a poet is to know himself completely; he seeks his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it," Rimbaud wrote. "The Poet makes himself into a seer by a long, involved and logical derangement of all the senses. Every kind of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself; he exhausts every possible poison so that only essence remains." Much has been made of the fact that Rimbaud added the qualifiers "long, involved and logical" to this second call for the "derangement of all the senses," nudging at the doors of perception rather than battering them down. But the sense is much the same; Rimbaud intends to turn his psyche inside out, to undergo whatever spiritual, emotional and physical tests he can devise. "Je" becomes "un autre" by deconstructing what it means to be "Je."