Arthur Rimbaud wrote a few pieces that set french poetry aghast around 1873. He'd taken to wandering Europe in lieu of university. His teachers hated him. There was a sort of subtle but perverse defiance to his work. He would create new words to describe the world around him, and produced pages of rhyming latin verse in his mathematics class while taking notes. For a time he produced latin homework for his fellow students and appeared, for a time, to raise the general standard. He criticized every popular structural form and his writings provided a new basis for creative literature in Europe. At the age of 21 Rimbaud renounced writing to explore distant countries. In 12 years he passed through almost 28 countries and amassed a small fortune in gold before complications from a gangrenous leg injury led to his untimely death. He became the first European to travel through northern Ethiopia. Confronted in North Africa by an employer, who told him his adolescent prose was not only alive in Europe but launching a career of its own, is quoted as one histrionic outburst. His former employer, Alfred Barley, wrote: [Rimbaud] would never allow me to mention his former literary works. Sometimes I asked him why he didn't take it up again. All I ever got were the usual replies: "Absurd, ridiculous, disgusting, etc."
Arthur Rimbaud wrote a few pieces that set french poetry aghast around 1873. He'd taken to wandering Europe in lieu of university. His teachers hated him. There was a sort of subtle but perverse defiance to his work. He would create new words to describe the world around him, and produced pages of rhyming latin verse in his mathematics class while taking notes. For a time he produced latin homework for his fellow students and appeared, for a time, to raise the general standard. He criticized every popular structural form and his writings provided a new basis for creative literature in Europe. At the age of 21 Rimbaud renounced writing to explore distant countries. In 12 years he passed through almost 28 countries and amassed a small fortune in gold before complications from a gangrenous leg injury led to his untimely death. He became the first European to travel through northern Ethiopia. Confronted in North Africa by an employer, who told him his adolescent prose was not only alive in Europe but launching a career of its own, is quoted as one histrionic outburst. His former employer, Alfred Barley, wrote: [Rimbaud] would never allow me to mention his former literary works. Sometimes I asked him why he didn't take it up again. All I ever got were the usual replies: "Absurd, ridiculous, disgusting, etc."
Über den Autor
Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) was a visionary French poet from Charleville who dreamed of reinventing love and changing life with his poetry. At the age of sixteen, he traveled to Paris at the invitation of poet Paul Verlaine, ten years his senior, and exploded onto the literary scene with "The Drunken Boat." In the ensuing years, Rimbaud further confirmed his place in literature with the spiritual autobiography "A Season in Hell" (the only work Rimbaud had printed himself) and forty-four scintillating prose texts that were later published as "The Illuminations." As notorious for his life as he was for his poetry, Rimbaud had a productive but tumultuous relationship with Verlaine, who shot him in the wrist in Brussels. After abandoning literature at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud enlisted in the Dutch colonial army in order to travel Java, deserting four months later and returning to France. In 1878, he traveled to Cyprus and worked as a foreman at a stone quarry. Two years later, he was living and working in Aden, Yemen, and then in Harar, Ethiopia, for an export agency. In 1885, he negotiated an arms deal with Menelik, the King of Shoa. A great walker all his life, Rimbaud developed a tumor in his right knee and soon returned to France in excruciating pain. His condition worsened, requiring doctors to amputate his right leg. Rimbaud died at the Hôpital de Conception in Marseille in 1891 at the age of thirty-seven; his body was returned to Charleville and buried in the Charleville-Mézières cemetery. Rimbaud's life and work have inspired countless writers, artists, and musicians, including the French Symbolists, the Beat generation, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison.
