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Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1981)
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 Rimbaud:
A Biography by Graham Robb
When he was not yet 17,
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris's literary society with
the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of
20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. "A
Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," and the prose
poems of Illuminations
were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form--and yet
their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his
short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. "He
was writing in a void," explains British scholar Graham Robb.
"In 1876, most of Rimbaud's admirers either were still in the
nursery or had yet to be conceived." Hardly surprising, since
the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to
actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing
soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as
scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church,
bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother
held dear. Rimbaud's stormy affair with Paul
Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and,
eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb's
depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless,
searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention
nor tenderness for others' weaknesses. The author doesn't soften
Rimbaud's "savage cynicism" or gloss over his frequently
obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for "one
of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial
rooms like an intelligent disease." Like Robb's excellent
biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental
portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. --Wendy Smith
 Arthur
Rimbaud : Complete Works by Paul Schmidt (Translator),
Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud is
remembered as much for his volatile personality and tumultuous
life as he is for his writings, most of which he produced before
the age of eighteen. This book brings together his poetry, prose,
and letters, including "The Drunken Boat," "The
Orphans' New Year," "After the Flood," and "A
Season in Hell," considered by many to be his. Complete
Works is divided into eight "seasons"--Childhood,
The Open Road, War, The Tormented Heart, The Visionary, The Damned
Soul, A Few Belated Cowardices, and The Man with the Wind at His
Heels--that reflect the facets of Rimbaud's life. Insightful
commentary by translator and editor Paul Schmidt reveals the
courage, vision, and imagination of Rimbaud's poetry and sheds
light on one of the most enigmatic figures in letters.
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Excerpt:
Had he set out deliberately to make his life a
source of myth, Arthur Rimbaud could hardly have done better. Born
in the small city of Charleville in northern France to an army
officer who left when Arthur was 6, and raised by a stern,
demanding, possessive mother, Rimbaud was until his 15th year a
precocious, well-behaved, religious child, a model student.
Encouraged by a local teacher in his attempts to write, he early
in 1870 published his first poem, and then in July of that year
ran away, heading for Paris. He was arrested for not having a
train ticket and was forced to return home, but this episode
marked the end of his formal education and the beginning of his
short but meteor-like career as a poet...
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From Encarta
Excerpt:
French poet of the symbolist school. He was born
and educated in Charleville, Ardennes Department. He exhibited
great intellectual precocity and wrote verse at the age of ten.
When he was 17, he composed the strikingly original poem,
"The Drunken Boat" (1871; trans. 1941), which he
submitted to the older poet Paul Verlaine. This work, which set
the tone of the entire symbolist, or decadent, movement, so
impressed Verlaine that he entreated the author to move to Paris.
Later, accompanied by Verlaine, he went to England and then to
Belgium. In Belgium, Verlaine, with whom Rimbaud had a stormy
relationship, tried twice to take the life of the younger poet,
wounding him seriously in the second attempt. Rimbaud wrote an
allegorical account of the matter in A Season in Hell
(1873; trans. 1932)...
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This site hosts a substantial amount of
Rimbaud's poems, a biography, an image gallery, and more.
Excerpt from the biography:
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud was born in
Charleville, France, on October 20, 1854. His father, Frédéric
Rimbaud, was captain in the army. His mother, Vitalie Cuif, came
from a family who were small landowners. Arthur had a brother,
older by a year, and two younger sisters.
At school, Arthur turned out to be a quiet but
brilliant scholar. He won prizes for almost every subject. For his
examination in Latin, - he was 14 at that time !! - he wrote 59
hexameters on a theme from Horace. "Tu Vates Eris", he
wrote in the last part. It was already crystal clear to him what
he wanted to be: a poet and a prophet...
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Names Index:
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M N
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