Arthur Rimbaud alias Alcide Bava

Charleville, Ardennes, 15 August 1871.

To Monsieur Theodore de Banville

What is said to the poet about flowers

Sir and cher Maitre,

Do you remember receiving from the province, in June 1870, a hundred or a hundred and fifty mythological hexameters entitled Credo in unam? You were kind enough to answer!

The same imbecile is sending you the above verses, signed Alcide Bava--I beg your pardon.

I am eighteen.--I will always love the verses of Banville.

Last year I was only seventeen!

Have I made any progress?

Alcide Bava

A.[rthur] R.[imbaud]

-from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters translation, introduction and notes by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 [6th impression]) p. 313.

Arthur Rimbaud in the Spring

To Theodore de Banville

Charleville (Ardennes), 24 May 1870.

Dear Maitre,

We are in the months of love; I am seventeen.* The age of hope and dreams, they say--and now I have begun, a child touched by the finger of the Muse--excuse me if this is banal--to express my good beliefs, my hopes, my sensations, all those things dear to poets--and this I call the spring.

If I send you some of these verses--and this thanks to Alph. Lemerre, the good publisher--it is because I love all poets, all good Parnassians--since the poet is a Parnassian--in love with ideal beauty. It is because I esteem in you, quite simply, a descendant of Rimbaud, a brother of our masters of 1830, a real romantic, a real poet. That is why. This is foolishness, isn't it? but still?

In two years, in one year perhaps, I will be in Paris,--Anch'io, gentlemen of the press, I will be a Parnassian! I do not know what is inside me . . .that wants to come out . . . . I swear, cher Maitre, I will always worship the two goddesses, the Muse and Liberty.

Do not frown too much as you read these verses . . . .You would make me delirious with joy and hope, if you were willing, cher Maitre, to make room for the poem Credo in unam among the Parnassians . . . . I would like to be in the last issue of Parnasse; it would become the Credo of the poets! . . . . O mad Ambition!

Arthur Rimbaud

*Rimbaud was actually fifteen on this date. The poem Rimbaud calls Credo in unam is later entitled Soleil et chair.

-from Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters translation, introduction and notes by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [6th impress.] 1975) p. 297-299.