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The distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brings his literary mastery to a new biography of Arthur Rimbaud. Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished. Even today, over a century after his death in 1891, his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon, marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the Symbolist movement in poetry. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in Africa. He was thirty-seven. Edmund White writes with a historian's eye for detail, driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject. White delves deep into the young poet's relationships with his family, his teachers, and his notorious affair with the more established poet Paul Verlaine. He follows the often elusive (sometimes blatant) threads of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's poems (in those days, sodomy was a crime) and offers incisive interpretations of the poems, using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.… (more)
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At age 16 he sent a few poems to Paul Verliane, already the leading figure in
Rimbaud never saw the profound effect his poetry had on French literature, nor did he ever see any fame from his work. At one point he tried to have all of his writing destroyed. Verlaine, who remained devoted to Rimbaud all his life, published his poetry long after their seperation, once Paris had had time enough to forget how hated Rimbaud had become. Rimbaud's poetry was a success; his reputation and influence have only grown since his death at age 36. Today, he enjoys a secure place in the cannon of French literature and a strong cult following.
Edmund White is his biggest fan.
Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is an informative biography but it's also a love letter. Mr. White discovered Rimbaud in school, when he was a lonely student, looking to find a place in the world. It's easy to see why Arthur Rimbaud would inspire Mr. White. Many teenagers see themselves as outsiders, gay teenagers especially so. In Rimbaud, young Edmund White found a kindred spirit. In his poetry he found inspiration.
In spite of his love for Rimbaud, Mr. White's biography is clear-eyed and honest. He doesn't suger-coat any of the details, nor treat his subject with kid gloves. Rimbaud was a horrible person. He may have been guided by a vision of literary greatness, but he was not a nice guy to be around. Paul Verlaine paid a very heavy price for his affair with the young poet. Mr. White's biography is in part a reading memoir, by which I mean an account of what it was like to read Rimbaud. It's here that Mr. White is free to justifiably gush over his subject. It's also here that Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel is most fun to read. I doubt anyone will end up loving Rimbaud the man as a result of Mr. White's book, but I do suspect I'm not the only one who'll give Rimbaud's poetry a try because of this biography.
I knew of Rimbaud and Verlaine before reading Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel but I'd never read any of his poetry beyond the peom about the vowels and their colors that often finds its way into school textbooks. I consider it a testiment to Mr. White's book that it made me want to read Rimbaud's poetry. I did and it's amazing. I can see why the young Edmund White fell in love with the author of The Drunken Boat.
Enough tears! Dawns break hearts.
Every moon is wrong, every sun bitter:
Love's bitter bite has let me swollen, drunk with heat.
Let my hull burst! Let me sink into the sea!
If I still long for Europe's waters, it's only for
One cold black puddle where a child crouches
Sadly at its brink and releases a boat,
Fragile as a May butterfly, into the fragrant dusk,
Bathed in your weary waves, I can no longer ride
In the wake of cargo ships of cotton,
Nor cross the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim beneath the killing stares of prison ships.
I've only a vague idea what Rimbaud is talking about, but I'm with him. I'll drink the absinthe. Sign me up Mr. White, I'm buying his complete poems