In 1871, he wrote of the poet becoming a seer through a “long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses”. That sentence became one of the great formulas of modern poetry: not intoxication as pleasure, but perception as violence, experiment and risk.

Around Rimbaud and Verlaine, the legends are thick: absinthe, hashish, scandal, love, flight, poverty, poetry, brutality and self-destruction. Some sources speak confidently of hashish; others warn that the drug mythology around Rimbaud often grew larger than the documents.

For LIBERA HERBA, the trace is not a claim that cannabis “made” Rimbaud.
That would be stupid.

The trace is the atmosphere: a 19th-century world where poetry, altered states, rebellion and the refusal of bourgeois order were tangled together.

Not proof.
A dangerous sentence.

A young poet turning perception itself into a battlefield.

Factual Note

Rimbaud’s phrase about the “long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses” comes from his 1871 letters, known as the Lettres du voyant. His relationship with Verlaine was associated with absinthe, scandal and bohemian excess; references to hashish exist in later biographical and cultural accounts, but direct documentation should be treated cautiously (link).

Arthur Rimbaud & Paul Verlain
A.B. 1854–1891; P.V. 1844–1896
French poets, 19th century

Two central figures of modern French poetry. Their violent, scandalous relationship and Rimbaud’s visionary poetics became part of the mythology of artistic rebellion, altered perception and the cursed poet.

Rimbaud and Verlaine – the derangement of all senses

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