A Poet makes hi…

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 among all men the great invalid, the great accursed– and the Supreme Scientist! For he attains the unknown! So what if he is destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable.

An excerpt from a letter to Paul Demeny written by Arthur Rimbaud