From the SelectedWorks of M. L. Stapleton

Le Poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens. [The poet makes himself a seer through a lengthy, enormous, and deliberate derangement of the senses.]--Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871 This remarkable observation has resonated in literary culture for numerous reasons.1 It has served as a kind of miniature manifesto for moderns who have wished to see themselves as visionaries or their gifts as supernal, be they of the tribe of T. S. Eliot or of a more adventuresome, Surrealist sort. Its exuberance is poignant concerning potential when Rimbaud’s later fate is considered. He died at thirty-seven, like Mozart, but stopped writing at twenty, the age at which his predecessor was just hitting his stride, musically speaking. His expression of self-inflicted sensory derangement for poetical purposes is bracingly original and, at the same time, adolescent in its self-dramatization, and this for good reason. He was all of sixteen when he composed his missive to Demeny explaining his artistic suffering during his season in hell in 1871, approximately Marlowe’s age on entering Corpus Christi, Cambridge, as an Archbishop Parker scholar in 1580. Though the playwright may not have taken himself quite as seriously as his nineteenth-century counterpart did, an epithet such as “flattering skie” (Luc 528) partakes of the same synesthesia as Rimbaud’s drunken boat, “Le Bateau ivre.” Critics have theorized that Marlowe undertook his translations almost simultaneously during his time a