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“A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence’s.” – Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny (May 15th, 1871)

At the tender age of fourteen, enfant terrible Rimbaud envisioned the Greek god Apollo wielding a heavenly fire to inscribe the words ‘YOU WILL BE A POET’ upon his forehead. Later on, at the more seasoned age of seventeen, he wrote to publisher Demeny outlining his belief that the first duty in the divine pursuit of the poet was to study the self in its uncomfortable entirety. He believed the poet must seek out their soul: inspect it, test it, learn it and finally, cultivate what it is they have discovered.

However, Rimbaud desired to raise himself above the mere title of ‘poet’. He set out on a purely personal revolution, on the quest to distinguish himself as a voyant. In order to achieve such a title, Rimbaud fabricated for himself a rigorous programme of psychological development which centred around a ‘systematized disorganisation of all the senses’. He believed by intentionally disrupting the normal functioning of the human senses, he could access previously unexplored realms of expression.

Le voyant must experience ‘unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength’, must experience the depths of love, of suffering, of madness. This is when the poet becomes a visionary, one who is able to capture the unknowable, one who is able to invent the language of the soul: giving words to ‘perfume, sounds, colours, thought grappling with thought’.

So, how can the modern artist use Rimbaud’s theory to enrich their own work? One could experiment with different forms of sensory overload: intentionally overwhelming the senses with bright lights or loud noises (either in real life or by writing about what this could feel like). One could also play with relationships between different senses: mixing them around verbally, using scents to describe emotions or sound to describe an image.

Or, you could take what Rimbaud says with a large chunk of salt. He stopped writing completely at the age of twenty, perhaps exhausted by his tumultuous love affair with Verlaine (which resulted in Rimbaud being shot in the arm), or maybe the child poet in him finally died as he went to seek fortune in other pursuits. However, I think what Rimbaud was really trying to express was the artist’s irresistible desire for depth – the poetic need for profound experiences and emotions, no matter good or bad.

Whether his quest to become the magnificent voyant was completed is up for debate, but he definitely made some damn good poems out of it.