Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Rimbaud

Rimbaud’s jab lands because it attacks the referee, not just the game. “Romanticism has never been properly judged” sounds, at first, like a plea for fairness. Then he snaps the trap shut: “Who was there to judge it? The critics!” The punchline is that the only people empowered to evaluate the movement are precisely the ones least equipped to understand it. Romanticism, in Rimbaud’s telling, isn’t misunderstood by accident; it’s misjudged by design, filtered through professional tastemakers whose job is to stabilize art into categories, reputations, and marketable legacies.

The subtext is pure poet-as-arsonist. Rimbaud came of age at the tail end of French Romanticism, watching it calcify into schoolroom pieties and salon mannerisms even as new shocks were arriving: modern urban life, political rupture after 1870, and the coming Symbolist turn. His own project was to break poetry’s inherited moral and aesthetic policing, to make the self “a seer” through derangement, risk, and invention. Critics represent the opposite impulse: adjudication, containment, after-the-fact verdicts.

The line also carries a sly institutional critique: critics don’t merely review; they manufacture the standard by which they claim to measure. If Romanticism feels “improperly judged,” Rimbaud implies, it’s because judgment itself is compromised when it’s outsourced to a class invested in order, not experience. The barb still scans now: movements get domesticated the moment they’re declared over, and the story of rebellion is often written by the people most threatened by it.