Rimbaud, Arthur << ram BOH, ar TEWR >> (1854-1891), was a French poet of extraordinary originality. Rimbaud wrote his major verse between the ages of 15 and 20. He then abandoned his literary career and became a trader in what is now Ethiopia.
Rimbaud was born on Oct. 20, 1854, in Charleville, France. His first poems satirize the people of his hometown and celebrate the joys of youth, often in violent, colloquial language. In 1871, Rimbaud went to Paris to deliver his visionary poem “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) to the French poet Paul Verlaine. He quickly built a reputation as a wild poet of genius. He also became involved in a love affair with Verlaine.
Rimbaud’s major work, Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), is an autobiographical narrative that evokes his painful relationship with Verlaine. The poem describes Rimbaud’s struggles with Christianity and French imperialism, and his experiments with hallucinatory poetry, the “verbal alchemy” which almost drove him insane. Verlaine published Rimbaud’s prose poems, Illuminations (1886), after Rimbaud left France. These innovative works create a verbal universe almost entirely separate from the outside world.
Rimbaud’s “Lettre du voyant” (“Visionary Letter,” 1871) describes the “long, immense and calculated derangement of all the senses” required to reach truth. His statement in this letter that “The Self is other than myself” was embraced by the Surrealist movement of the 1920’s. Rimbaud died on Nov. 10, 1891.
See also Symbolism.
