To spend as much time working on this book as Rimbaud spent producing four small bodies of work, each of which represents a different stage in the history of modern poetry. Of Baudelaire's poetry, written in French and published in 1993 (so, in ''Rimbaud'' Robb is able to write of his subject, ''Few poets ever profited so richly from bad poetry'') Ī biography of Balzac, published in 1994 (''The brevity of Rimbaud's work tends to conceal'' his ''encyclopedic urge, which makes him a close literary relative of Balzac'') Ī scholarly speculation, ''Unlocking Mallarmé,'' published in 1996 (''For Mallarmé, Rimbaud was the sort of attractive hooligan who could (and did) do serious damage to French literature'') Īnd a biography of Victor Hugo, published in 1997 (''Apart from Hugo, no French poet of the late 19th century had a greater impact on imperial politics or earned more money'').įor only when we acknowledge the density, the scope and the velocity of Robb's earlier work can we appreciate the caveat that concludes the introduction to his latest: ''I have not found the Rimbaud I expected to find, nor did I expect They have, as it were, assisted him to insights that mean his ''Rimbaud'' is more than a mere latecomer's triumph: a study Light''), some note must be taken of Robb's previous books. a great deal of new information has come to
#RIMBAUD ILLUMINATIONS POEMS FULL#
The disease (perhaps syphilis) spread, and Rimbaud died in 1891, at 37.Īppropriately to value this new biography, which I believe to be superior to all its predecessors in English or French (for as its author observes, ''since the last full biographies of Rimbaud.
In 1891 he developed a tumor on his right knee and returned to France, In his last two years he ran a successful trading post in Harar, east of Addis Ababa, exporting coffee, hides and musk, and importing guns. The East, worked for a construction firm in Cyprus, and by 1880, working for a coffee company based in Aden, explored Somalia and northeast Africa by 1886, he was gunrunning for the king of Shewa (now the central province After travel in Germany and the Netherlands, he deserted from the Dutch Colonial Army three weeks after arriving in Batavia (now Jakarta) and returned home. In 1874, Rimbaud renounced literature and again crossed the Channel to study English in order Up with the recently married Verlaine Verlaine eventually shot the boy in the wrist for attempting to leave him in Brussels. When the delinquent invaded the literary circles of Paris after the Franco-Prussian War, he took What was the life that generated this figure? Born in 1854 into the bleakest French bourgeoisie (his infantry-captain father deserted his wife and four children), Rimbaud committed his early years to precocious literary exercises in defiance of his fiercelyĬonventional mother and punctuated them by several flights from home - and several returns (sometimes under police escort). The ''figure'' of Rimbaud is the ghost at the banquet of literature: his radical rejection of poetry (not of writing, as Graham Robb makes clear: correspondence from Rimbaud's last 15 years constitutesĪ significant share of his output) has been appropriated by literary history as his most enduringly poetic act. Yet this endless judiciary process ensures an immortality which has little to do with the works of Arthur Rimbaud (who took the initiative to publish only one volume, ''Une Saison en Enfer'' (''A Season in Hell''),Ī collection of nine prose poems all his other writing appeared under others' auspices (he was long gone in Africa when the ''Illuminations'' finally saw book form). The superman, the mystic, Rimbaud the Catholic, the cabalist, the atheist, etc.) the latest ''proved'' avatar is forever recycled as evidence - faulty or secure - on which to base the next. It would seem that no definitive identification can be made (Rimbaud the symbolist, the surrealist, the Bolshevik, Rimbaud the bourgeois, the crook, the pervert, Rimbaud the prophet, Till another biography of the poet who stopped writing before he was 20! Over a century after his death, the procession of biographers, translators,Ĭritics and hagiographers continues. Graham Robb's biography treats the life and the work as a single thing.
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