"Misfortune was my god"
About this Quote
A teenager declaring “Misfortune was my god” isn’t confessing a taste for melodrama; he’s announcing a theology of rupture. Rimbaud’s line compresses his whole project into five words: if there is a deity worth serving, it’s the force that breaks you open, humiliates you, exiles you from the respectable self. “God” isn’t comfort here. It’s authority, discipline, a demand. He recasts suffering as a chosen sovereign, turning what looks like victimhood into a kind of perverse vocation.
The subtext is both defiant and self-implicating. To call misfortune a god is to admit devotion: repetition, ritual, surrender. Rimbaud isn’t merely describing bad luck; he’s indicting his own appetite for extremity, the way catastrophe can become an aesthetic and moral stimulant. It’s a line that knows how easily the modern artist myth weaponizes pain into credibility. If the world won’t grant you legitimacy, you can anoint your wounds as sacred.
Context makes it hit harder. Rimbaud writes out of a 19th-century France where piety and propriety still police meaning, and he responds with a blasphemy that’s also a critique: if traditional religion has failed to explain the churn of history, poverty, violence, and private despair, then the only honest altar is the one built from wreckage. Coming from the poet who burns brightly, torches his own life, and then walks away from literature, the phrase reads like a self-portrait of talent that treats disaster not as an accident, but as a method.
The subtext is both defiant and self-implicating. To call misfortune a god is to admit devotion: repetition, ritual, surrender. Rimbaud isn’t merely describing bad luck; he’s indicting his own appetite for extremity, the way catastrophe can become an aesthetic and moral stimulant. It’s a line that knows how easily the modern artist myth weaponizes pain into credibility. If the world won’t grant you legitimacy, you can anoint your wounds as sacred.
Context makes it hit harder. Rimbaud writes out of a 19th-century France where piety and propriety still police meaning, and he responds with a blasphemy that’s also a critique: if traditional religion has failed to explain the churn of history, poverty, violence, and private despair, then the only honest altar is the one built from wreckage. Coming from the poet who burns brightly, torches his own life, and then walks away from literature, the phrase reads like a self-portrait of talent that treats disaster not as an accident, but as a method.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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