Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the marvelous boy-poet of French literature, established in a few short years his reputation for hallucinative verbal creation, only to give up poetry at the age of 19.

The tempestuous life of Arthur Rimbaud his relations with Paul Verlaine, his idea of the poet as seer and of the derangement of the senses are all part of the legend. His literary fame depends primarily upon the poem Le Bateau ivre and the remarkable volumes called Les Illuminations and Une Saison en Enfer. His abandonment of art and "the ancient parapets of Europe" has made Rimbaud a symptomatic and fascinating figure of alienation in the modern world.

A brilliant student in his native town of Charleville, Rimbaud published his first known French verses (Les Étrennes des orphelins) in La Revue pour tous for Jan. 2, 1870. Other early poems were Sensation, Ophélie, Credo in Unam (later called Soleil et chair), and Le Dormeur du val. Les Chercheuses de poux is a memorable example of beauty created from what seems at first a most unpromising subject; and Voyelles, with its coloring of the vowels ("A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels…"), aroused considerable interest in the aspect of synesthesia known as audition colorée (colored hearing).

On May 15, 1871, Rimbaud wrote his famous Lettre du voyantto a friend, Paul Demeny: "I say that one must be a seer, make himself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses… . He exhausts in himself all the poisons, to preserve only their quintessences… . For he arrives at the unknown …."

In late September 1871 Rimbaud joined Verlaine in Paris, bringing with him the manuscript of Le Bateauivre, one of the most remarkable poems of the century. It describes the adventures of a boat left free to drift down American rivers after its crew have been murdered by screaming Native Americans. The boat's progress is traced from its first exaltation at its freedom to its awakening on the stormy "poem of the sea," through a wild tumult of snows and tides and suns and hurricanes, amid vast imagery from the beginning of the world, until it becomes at last only a waterlogged plank, nostalgic for Europe and no longer worth salvaging. The poem is a marvel of hallucinative evocation and seems in a way to foreshadow Rimbaud's own strange life.

The turbulent relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud ended finally with Verlaine in prison for shooting his friend in the wrist and with Rimbaud disoriented and restless. Rimbaud had Une Saison en Enfer printed in Belgium in 1873 and distributed a few copies, but he did not even claim the rest of the edition. Les Illuminations did not appear until Verlaine published the volume in 1886. Meanwhile, Rimbaud had given up poetry forever.

After years of wandering, Rimbaud lived as an African explorer, trader, and gunrunner. In 1888 he was at Harar working for an exporter of coffee, hides, and musk. A tumor of the knee forced his return to Marseilles in 1891, where his right leg was amputated. He died in the hospital there on Nov. 10, 1891, at the age of 37.

Critics have called Rimbaud one of the creators of free verse for such poems as Marine and Mouvement in Les Illuminations. Rimbaud had written in Une Saison en Enfer: "I believed I could acquire supernatural powers. Well! I must bury my imagination and my memories!" He apparently wrote nothing more after his farewell to letters at the age of 19.

Further Reading

Rimbaud's works have been extensively translated into English. Biographies in English are Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud (1938; rev. ed. 1961), and Elisabeth M. Hanson, My Poor Arthur: A Biography of Arthur Rimbaud (1960). Useful critical studies of the poet include Cecil Arthur Hackett, Rimbaud (1957); Wilbur Merrill Frohock, Rimbaud's Poetic Practice: Image and Theme in the Major Poems (1963); John Porter Houston, The Design of Rimbaud's Poetry (1963); Gwendolyn Bays, The Orphic Vision; Seer Poets from Novalis to Rimbaud (1964); and Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1966), a rewriting of his earlier Rimbaud: The Myth of Childhood
(1946) and Rimbaud's Illuminations (1953).

Additional Sources

Borer, Alain, Rimbaud in Abyssinia, New York: William Morrow, 1991.

Carre, Jean Marie, A season in hell: the life of Arthur Rimbaud, New York: AMS Press, 1979.

Delahaye, Ernest, Rimbaud, Monaco: Editions Sauret, 1993.

Forbes, Duncan, Rimbaud in Ethiopia, Hythe, England: Volturna Press, 1979.

Hare, Humphrey, Sketch for a portrait of Rimbau, New York, Haskell House Publishers, 1974.

Petitfils, Pierre, Rimbaud, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987.

Starkie, Enid, Arthur Rimbaud, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978, 1961.

ADVERTISEMENT

For more information on Jean-Nicolas- Arthur Rimbaud, visit Britannica.com.

Rimbaud Arthur (Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud) (1854-91). Few poets can have acquired so high a reputation as Arthur Rimbaud on the basis of so slender an œuvre and so brief a career. From the moment his legendary Illuminations saw print in 1886, the sheer inventiveness of his writings, seemingly indissociable from the eventfulness of his life, has been the subject of fervent and noisy debate, to the extent that the strict data of biography and literary production are now engulfed in innumerable theories and conflicting interpretations. Rimbaud remains the outstanding example in French literature of a meteoric talent giving rise to enduring controversy.

A crude summary of his life reduces it to two stretches of relatively steady existence on either side of the eruptive creative adventure at its centre. A model schoolboy, Rimbaud seemed content to please his mother by gaining annual prizes at his college in Charleville (in the Ardennes), until his early satirical verse began to voice his hatred of an environment he saw as totally debilitating, with abrasive attacks on the sanctity of bourgeois routine in ‘A la musique’, on Christianity in ‘Les Premières Communions’, and on orthodox notions of the beautiful in ‘Vénus Anadyomène’, a sonnet about a hag stepping from her bath-tub. Disruptions to local life due to the Prussian invasion of mid-1870 coincided with symptomatic episodes when the teenager repeatedly ran away from home; it is thought he may have witnessed the brief apogee of the Paris Commune in the spring of 1871. The period of his late teens (c.1870-c.1874) saw the abrupt flowering of a unique talent as, like a gambler whose daring never fails, Rimbaud moved in the space of a few months from structured verse through progressively more liberated verse (the poems known as ‘Derniers vers’) and on to the prose poem, of which he would become one of the first masters. In September 1871, still not yet 17, he had tucked into his pocket an astonishing poem, ‘Le Bateau ivre’—a maritime allegory of the visionary process—and taken leave of Charleville, journeying to Paris to take the literary establishment by storm. Almost at once he entered on a turbulent erotic relationship with Verlaine, and travelled with him to London, the backdrop to several of the dream-like scenarios elaborated in Illuminations. After a violent break with Verlaine, Rimbaud spent some years drifting through casual jobs in northern and southern Europe, having by now effectively abandoned literature. By the end of the decade he had also abandoned Europe, pursuing a mercantile career in the obscure regions of Abyssinia, and only returning to his homeland because of illness. He died in Marseille in 1891, aged 37.

The terms of the Rimbaud legend were dictated by Verlaine, who first dubbed him a poète maudit and published Illuminations without their author's knowledge as the relics of a genius who had touched perfection and then moved on to the alternative ascesis of day-to-day existence. This narrative of striving and renunciation is consistent with the confessional themes of Une saison en enfer, completed in the summer of 1873, where the writer describes ecstatic visions which he later relinquishes because of the physical torment they entail. A plausible interpretation of the chapter ‘L'Alchimie du verbe’, when read in conjunction with two earlier texts which had excitedly announced the new visionary approach, the so-called ‘Lettres du voyant’ of May 1871, is that Rimbaud induced actual states of voyance by way of drugs and alcohol and then transliterated his experiences into an image-laden idiom embodying ‘l'hallucination des mots’. The 40-odd prose pieces of the Illuminations cycle amount to a phantasmagorical documentation of the creative process, one which charts the itinerary of a consciousness visited by chimerical spectacles, by turns monstrous and ravishing and seemingly inseparable from the literary tropes wherein they find expression. Cryptic allusions to apocalyptic omens and ineffable harmonies, and the hint that ‘illumination’ is a transcendental (and thus extra-literary) event, have laid such texts open to religious readings which cast their author in the role of an unorthodox prophet. Other readings stress the virtuosity of a poetic discourse which marries baffling enigma to thrilling suggestion, and at a stroke transforms the reading experience from one of intellectual construal to one of emotional participation. ‘J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage’, the poet warns us, although recent research indicates that many of his impenetrable formulations embody empirical references to contemporary society. Yet to acknowledge that Rimbaud's mature work echoes the lexical and cultural codes of his age is not necessarily to reduce all he wrote to mimetic explicitness and a univocal legibility. The irreducible strength of Rimbaud's ‘alchemy of the word’ remains its sheer rhetorical confidence, the inimitable assertiveness, the beguiling violence, of its imagery and tone.

[Roger Cardinal]

Bibliography

• Y. Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-même (1961)
• R. G. Cohn, The Poetry of Rimbaud (1973)
• A. Kittang, Discours et jeu: essai d'analyse des textes d'Arthur Rimbaud (1975)
• A. Borer (ed.), L'Œuvre-Vie d'Arthur Rimbaud (1991)

(ärtür' răNbō') , 1854–91, French poet who had a great influence on the symbolists and subsequent modern poets, b. Charleville. A defiant and precocious youth, Rimbaud at 16 sent some poems to Verlaine, who liked his work and invited him to Paris. In 1872–73 the two poets lived together in London and Brussels. In a drunken quarrel Verlaine fired a pistol, wounding Rimbaud, and their relationship ended. Rimbaud returned home and finished Une Saison en enfer (1873), a confessional autobiography in which he renounces his former hellish life and his work. At an undetermined time he produced Les Illuminations, consisting of prose poems that transcend all traditional syntax and narrative elements.

Rimbaud is thought to have stopped writing poetry at the age of 19, and he never wrote another literary work. Thereafter, he wandered throughout Europe and N Africa, working in various jobs, from circus cashier to commercial traveler to African gunrunner, and engaging in numerous business ventures. Six months after the amputation of his leg due to cancer, he died in Marseilles at 37. Rimbaud's poetry has been called hallucinatory because the poet seems to write not of material reality but of his dreamworld; his technique anticipates the symbolists in its suggestiveness, its abstract verbal music, and its images drawn from the subconscious. “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”) is an outstanding example. Rimbaud's works were published by Verlaine in several posthumous editions, the first complete collection appearing in 1898.

Bibliography

See W. Mason, ed. and tr., Rimbaud Complete (2002) and I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud (2003); biographies by E. Starkie (3d ed. 1961, repr. 1968) and G. Robb (2000); studies by W. M. Frohock (1963), W. Fowlie (1966), R. G. Cohn (1974), K. Ross (1980), C. A. Hackett (1981), and C. Nicholl (1999).

Quotes:

"I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain."

"And again: No more gods! no more gods! Man is King, Man is God! -- But the great Faith is Love!"

"I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there."

"I is another."

"Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge."

"Life is the farce which everyone has to perform."

See more famous quotes by Arthur Rimbaud

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)