Arthur Rimbaud

:"Rimbaud" redirects here. For other uses see Rimbaud (disambiguation)

Life and work

He was born into the rural middle class of Charleville (now part of Charleville-Mézières) in the Ardennes département in northeastern France. As a boy Rimbaud was a restless but brilliant student. By the age of fifteen, he had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in Latin.

Related Topics:
Charleville-Mézières - Ardennes - Département - Latin

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In 1870 his teacher Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's first literary mentor, and his original verses in French began to improve rapidly. He frequently ran away from home and may have briefly joined the Paris Commune of 1871, which he portrayed in his poem "L'Orgie parisienne ou Paris se repeuple" (the Parisian orgy or Paris repopulates). He may have been a victim of sexual assault by drunken Communard soldiers (his poem "Le C?ur supplicié" - "The Tortured Heart" - suggests so). By then he had become an anarchist, started drinking and amused himself by shocking the local bourgeois with his shabby dressing and long hair. At the same time he wrote to Izambard and Paul Démeny about his method for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long, immense and rational derangement of all the senses" ("Les lettres du Voyant" - "The Letters of the Seer"). He returned to Paris in late September 1871 at the invitation of the eminent Parnassian poet Paul Verlaine (profoundly impressed by the reading of Rimbaud's masterwork "Le bateau ivre", "The Drunken Boat"), moving briefly into Verlaine's home. Verlaine (who was bisexual), promptly fell in love with the sullen blue-eyed overgrown (5 ft 10 in) light-brown haired adolescent, and shortly after they became lovers, leading a dissolute vagabond-like life, rocked by absinthe and hashish taking. They scandalized the Parisian literary elite, particularly on account of the outrageous behaviour of Rimbaud, the archetypical enfant terrible. Throughout this period he continued to write strikingly visionary, modern verses, topping his master Charles Baudelaire.

Related Topics:
1870 - Georges Izambard - Paris Commune - Paris - 1871 - Parnassian - Paul Verlaine - Bisexual - Absinthe - Hashish - Archetypical - Enfant terrible - Visionary - Charles Baudelaire

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Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy homosexual relationship took them to London in 1872, when Verlaine left his wife and infant son (whom he used to mistreat badly during his alcoholic rages). In July 1873, after a particularly violent quarrel in Brussels train station, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Fearing for his life, Rimbaud called for the police. Verlaine was arrested and subjected to an humiliating medico-legal examination, following the perusal of their compromising correspondance and the accusations of Verlaine's wife about the "nature" of their friendship. The judge was merciless and, in spite of Rimbaud having withdrawn the complaint, he sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison. Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing and a description of that "drôle de ménage" (hell of a couple) life with Verlaine, his "pitoyable frère" ("sorrowful brother"), the "vierge folle" ("mad virgin") of whom he was "l'époux infernal" ("the hellish husband"). In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germain Nouveau and assembled his controversial Illuminations, which includes the first two French poems in free verse.

Related Topics:
Homosexual - London - 1872 - 1873 - Brussels - Une Saison en Enfer - Symbolist - 1874 - Germain Nouveau - Illuminations - Free verse

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