The Time of the Assassins

The book began in failure: in the mid-forties Miller set out to translate A Season in Hell and found the poems wouldn't cross — so he wrote around them instead, and the essays grew through the decade into the volume New Directions issued in 1956. His Rimbaud is only lightly biographical: the vertiginous facts — all of modern poetry detonated between sixteen and nineteen, then total renunciation, gun-running and trading in Abyssinia, the amputation, the early death — are scaffolding for the real subject, which is what Rimbaud's surrender means for everyone who kept writing.

Miller reads the poet as his own inverted twin — the analogies between their lives, from the domineering mothers onward, are drawn openly and without embarrassment — and reads the renunciation as the era's great open wound: the purest imagination of the age looked at literature and chose silence. Out of Rimbaud's line about the time of the assassins, Miller builds his indictment of the century that followed — the mechanized, murderous world the poets warned about. Scholars have never known what shelf to put it on; poets have kept it in print for seventy years.

Three long essays in rising temperature. First, the life and the analogy: Rimbaud's comet-arc through poetry and out of it, braided with Miller's confession of kinship — the mothers, the flights, the hatred of every harness. Second, the deep reading: what the poems actually did to language, and what the silence after them says. Third, the prophecy: the 'time of the assassins' as the twentieth century's true name, with Rimbaud as the seer who saw it coming and refused to attend.

No French required — Miller quotes in translation and paraphrases freely. Come for Rimbaud; stay for the most naked self-portrait Miller ever smuggled into someone else's biography.