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Rather his work was an interior affair having little to do with what others thought or did not think. For he seems very quickly to have feund out that he had a much more dangerous and subtle enemy than his acquaintances: one which would sooner or later ruin the whole adventure; so that looking backward in Une Saison en Enfer he summed up his tactics in the words "Je m'évade."

The document which is said to have described his first intimacies with magic, Les Chasses Spirituelles, was left in Paris with Mme. Verlaine, when Rimbaud and Verlaine went to London. Later when the lady brought suit for separation against her husband, she held the manuscript as possible evidence and then presumably lost it. The record therefore begins in the midst of things with Les Illuminations, a heterogeneous collection of notes in prose and verse. Some of these are obviously, for one reason or another, out of the period, for example, Rimbaud's last poem in his grand manner which begins with a crash of breaking china:

This poem is said to have been written while he was drunk. Sober he had passed miles beyond, in verse to still, perfect songs, "rhythmes naïfs, refrains niais"; in prose to a manner which still echoes in much of our best free verse, not yet the rapid, passionate ejaculations of Une Saison en Enfer, aimed at the joints of humanity, but a tense whisper of icy delirium.

There are also two poems in the free verse of his own invention, Marine and Mouvement, colossal, static structures, one block piled carefully on another, that have never to my knowledge been imitated.

It is curious that a poet whose verses had been so flatly regular, who had criticized Verlaine for a misplaced caesura, and whose first adventure out of bounds (as he considered it) was into a favourite verse form of the late Andrew Lang, should later have become famous as one of the founders of a new school of poetry. The secret of his innovation, I think, is in that sentence of his letter where he advised the poet to give "unform" to his formless discoveries: a simple idea, which yet did not preclude in its discoverer's work a complex system of internal rhymes and relations.