FREE ESSAY ON RIMBAUD AND GINSBERG

RIMBAUD AND GINSBERG

Rimbaud and Ginsberg as Modern Poets
Anyone who has read a fair sampling of modernist poetry or studied some representative
visionary poets has found the experience something of a revelation. Immediately
exhilarating for some, initially intimidating for others and, for all of us, a profound
departure from traditional literature. According to Rimbaud, for a poet to be absolutely
modern he must become a visionary and 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 quintessences. Rimbaud's most notable work, A Season in Hell is the
perfect example of how his choice of lifestyle lent the necessary experiences to be
closer to God and ultimately creative poetry. Through the use drugs and other devices,
Rimbaud was able to unearth the core of his soul while still being able to capture divine
inspiration on paper before delirium set in. 
Allen Ginsberg's greatest work Howl is similar to A Season in Hell in that it ultimately
captures Ginsberg's life experiences as the reader can but only grasp the means by which
such a seemingly chaotic life is conducive to ingenious literature. Among the many
similarities between these two poets, the first would be that there was an absent father
and a domineering mother. For most, this situation would lead to a child trying to attain
control over his surroundings. For Ginsberg and Rimbaud, however, this family life helped
create the starting point for their need to understand their world around them.
Both Ginsberg and Rimbaud had many mentors in their early years. Rimbaud's relationship
with Verlaine allowed him to express himself sexually and poetically thus giving him the
necessary material to fuel his disorganization of the senses. Among Ginsberg's many
mentors, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burrows and Neil Cassidy, who were equally obsessed
with poetry, sex and drugs, helped him to develop his literary voice. The similarities
between Rimbaud's use of absinthe and Ginsberg's experimentations with Benzedrine,
marijuana and homosexually, believed that he, like Rimbaud, was ultimately working toward
a great poetic vision which Kerouac called The New Vision.
In literary terms, Ginsberg follows in Rimbaud's footsteps with the use of symbolism and
free verse. From what we've studied in class, the bulk of these poets' works resemble a
colorfully adventurous diary documenting the adventures of two of literatures greatest
visionary poets. In William Carlos William's introduction to Howl he writes Allen
Ginsberg, who has gone in his own body through the horrifying experiences described from
life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he,
from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love. And, in a statement, that
could adequately describe Rimbaud's work he writes hold back the edges of your gowns,
Ladies, we are going through hell.
After a Season in Hell and Howl, both poets mellowed out considerably and began to travel
the world. Rimbaud, finding his love of gunrunning in Africa and Ginsberg finding his
physical love, Peter Orlovsky. What can we, as the readers, conceptualize about these
poets' life's works? Why did Rimbaud give up writing? Did he, perhaps, get so close to
God that the light was too bright and he decided to be content in a more mundane career.
Did Ginsberg attain his own level of expectations in his life's work or did the events
that led up to the creation of Howl alter his future work? What we are left with in these
poets' great works is merely a glimpse, however haunting and beautiful, into two human
beings attempt to view life in the most spiritual light attainable. 
Ginsberg writes:
I high on laughing gas
I've been here before
The odd vibration of
The same old universe
The universe is a void
In which there is a dream hole
The dream disappears
The hole closes
It's the instant of going
Into or coming out of
Existence that is
Important-to catch on
To the secret of the magic
Box.
When I was fifteen years old, I discovered the book of Rimbaud's work in my high school
library and was discouraged from reading it by a poet friend of mine twelve years my
senior. He, knowing that I took much of my reading to heart, thought that Rimbaud's
chaotic view of the world would somehow corrupt my youth. What I have learned in this
class is that it is the experience of reading these poets' works that allows one to
safely live vicariously through the soul of the poet and see the world in such a way they
may have not known it existed. An example of this, for me personally, was reading the
Sunflower Sutra. I will never see a sunflower without thinking of this poem and the way
in which Ginsberg gives the object of his affection such everlasting life. The modernist
poets from Rimbaud to Ginsberg and beyond give artistic license to all writers to test
the boundaries of their senses and unabashedly give account of their personal experience
of the beauty that surrounds each of us.