Arthur Rimbaud Overview

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is... [more]

Arthur Rimbaud made his way through language like some crazed channeler of unseen forces. As a Symbolist poet, Rimbaud scrambled the senses and his prose, forging a synesthetic wash of words sustained by their own momentum and internal sense. There is no clear form (he did not write sonnets); there's no iambic pentameter; nor is there always clear meaning. Rimbaud anticipated the free-form poetry of the Beats and the odd juxtapositions of the Surrealists while embodying all the angst, suffering, and drama of the Romantic nineteenth century of which he was a part. Rimbaud was schooled in Charleville, a town in northeastern France where his family lived in poverty (his father had abandoned them when Rimbaud was six). Rimbaud was presumably a brilliant and precocious young man, immersing himself in his studies to offset the pains of poverty. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out in July of 1870, Rimbaud ran away from home. For the next year, he lived a squalid existence (he seemed to thrive on suffering) and continued to read poetry, prose, philosophy, and the occult. In 1871, he sent his poems to the poet Paul Verlaine, who invited the young Rimbaud to live with him in Paris. The two became lovers, off and on, for the next two years, moving to London once the French literati had had enough of their depravity. Their relationship was often tumultuous; Verlaine spent 18 months in prison for hitting Rimbaud, who showed a certain schadenfreude at the situation. Soon after their relationship dissolved, Rimbaud, not even 20 years old, gave up writing. And in truly odd, Romantic fashion, he became a trader and gunrunner in Africa. He died in Marseille on Nov. 10, 1891, following the amputation of his right leg. In his brief tenure as a poet, Rimbaud transformed the face of writing, turning out a prodigious amount of tortured, passionate, and angst-riddled work, including "Illuminations," "Sonnet of Vowels," "The Drunken Boat," "Letter from the Seer," and his infamous "Season in Hell." His combination of bravado, intelligence, spirituality, sexuality, and psychedelia has acted as proclaimed inspiration to a whole generation of twentieth-century rock 'n' rollers -- Jim Morrison, Patty Smith, and Bob Dylan among them. [show less]