Parenting & Family Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud doesn’t flatter “childhood” as innocence; he weaponizes it as access. “Recovery” is a surgeon’s word, not a sentimental one: something lost, something fought for, something reclaimed against the grain of adulthood. The sting is in “at will.” Genius isn’t being stuck in perpetual adolescence or having a naturally unspoiled gaze. It’s control. It’s the ability to summon the child’s sensory greed, reckless curiosity, and refusal of polite categories on command, then translate that raw intake into art with adult technique.

The subtext doubles as a critique of bourgeois maturity. For Rimbaud, growing up often means being trained into predictability: correct taste, correct ambition, correct feeling. His early work and his famous doctrine of derangement (the poet as a “seer” achieved through systematic disorientation) argue that perception has to be re-broken open. Childhood is the metaphor for that widened aperture - a mind that hasn’t yet learned which perceptions to discard as “too much,” “too weird,” or “not useful.”

Context sharpens the claim: Rimbaud was a teenage prodigy who burned through poetry at high speed and then abandoned it. That biography turns “at will” into both prophecy and warning. Genius demands a reversible relationship with childhood, not a permanent residency there. You visit that state, you don’t drown in it. The line’s brilliance is how it frames creativity as disciplined regression: a chosen return to first contact with the world, before habit turns everything into background noise.