“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. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed–and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone! He attains the unknown, and if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he will at least have seen them! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable: other horrible workers will come; they will begin at the horizons where the first one has fallen!”
― Arthur Rimbaud
“In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.”
— Une Saison En Enfer
Rimbaud was a 19th century poetic prodigy whose tempestuous relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine inspired Verlaine to try and shoot him. Rimbaud wrote only in his youth — he stopped entirely when he was 21.
How my heart sings 