I am filthy. I am riddled with lice. Hogs, when they look at me, vomit. My skin is encrusted with the scabs and scales of leprosy, and covered with yellow pus.[…] A family of toads has taken up residence in my left armpit and, when one of them moves, it tickles. Mind one of them does not escape and come and scratch the inside of your ear with its mouth; for it would then be able to enter your brain.”
Poems I
The poetic moans of this century are only sophisms.
The first principles must be out of discussion.
I accept Euripides and Sophocles; but I do not accept Aeschylus.
Do not show lack of the most basic proprieties
and bad taste towards the creator.
Repel unbelief: you will please me.
There are only two kinds of poetry; there is only one.
There is a little tacit convention between the author and the reader, by
which the first calls himself sick, and accepts the second as
nurse. It is the poet who consoles humanity! The roles are
switched arbitrarily.
I will not leave any Memoirs.
Poetry is not the storm, any more than the cyclone. It is a
majestic and fertile river.
It is only by admitting the night physically that we have managed to
do it morally. O Young nights! you gave me a lot of
migraines!
We only dream when we sleep. It is words like the dream one,
nothingness of life, terrestrial passage, the preposition perhaps, the
disordered tripod, which have infiltrated into your souls this damp poetry
of languors, like rottenness. Going from words to ideas,
there is only one step.
Disturbances, anxieties, depravities, death, exceptions
tions in the physical or moral order, the spirit of negation, stupefactions
, hallucinations served by the will, torments,
destruction, reversals, tears, insatiabilities,
enslavements, digging imaginations, novels, what is
unexpected, what not to do, the chemical peculiarities of the
mysterious vulture that awaits the carrion of some dead illusion,
the precocious and aborted experiences, the
bug- shell obscurities , the terrible monomania of the pride, the inoculation of
deep stupors , funeral orations, envies, betrayals, tyrannies
, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, pranks
aggressive, dementia, spleen, reasoned fright,
strange worries, which the reader would prefer not to experience,
grimaces, neuroses, bloody channels, through which we make
logic pass at bay, exaggerations, absence of sincerity,
the saws, the platitudes, the gloomy, the gloomy, the childbirth worse
than the murders, the passions, the clan of the novelists of the courts of assizes,
the tragedies, the odes, the melodramas, the extremes presented in perpetuity.
death, reason whistled with impunity, the smells of sissy,
fading, frogs, octopuses, sharks, the simoun of the
deserts, which is somnambulist, fishy, nocturnal, sleeping pill, night owl,
slimy, talking seal, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac
, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphrodite, bastard, albino, pederast,
aquarium phenomenon and bearded woman, the drunken hours of
taciturn discouragement , the fantasies, the acridities, the monsters,
demoralizing syllogisms , garbage, what does not reflect like the child,
desolation, this intellectual mancenillier, the scent cankers, the
thighs of camellias, the guilt of a writer who rolls on the slope
of nothingness and is despises himself with joyful cries, remorse,
hypocrisies, the vague perspectives which crush you in their
imperceptible meshes , the serious spitting on sacred axioms, the
vermin and its insinuating tickles, the insane prefaces, like
those of Cromwell, Mlle de Maupin and Dumas fils, the caducities,
the impotences, the blasphemies, the asphyxiations, the suffocations, the
rages - in front of these filthy mass graves, which I blush to name, it is
time to finally react against what shocks us and bends us so
sovereignly.
Le Compte De Lauetremonot- Maldoror