Rimbaud
The Double Life of a Rebel
“White’s abiding kinship with Rimbaud gives this restless soul’s well-traveled tale new fire.” —Vanity Fair
Arthur Rimbaud swore off poetry at the age of twenty-one. But in those few years he was writing, the teenaged genius managed not only to astonish and shock his contemporaries, but to earn himself a place in the pantheon of literary greats. His long poem A Season in Hell (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are essential to the modern canon. Stigmatized for his tumultuous affair with Paul Verlaine, he subsequently exiled himself from bohemian Paris, and ultimately died from an infection contracted while selling coffee and guns in Ethiopia. He was thirty-seven.
Here is no dry, academic chronology that gives you the facts about a long-dead poet. Edmund White feels a deep personal connection with his subject, and to that connection he brings first-rate scholarship as well as a poet’s sensibilities. White delves deep into the young poet’s relationships with his family, his teachers, and his lover Verlaine. He follows the often elusive themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud’s works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet.
“Although White notes that ‘a biographer of Rimbaud could fill his pages with nothing but his ceaseless comings and goings,’ his own account is slim and skillfully blends action and analysis.”
— The New Yorker
“Two things set Mr White's book apart from other Rimbaud biographies. First is the extent to which he identifies with his hero. Second, and more significant, is his emphasis on the relationship with Verlaine, to the extent that the book reads almost as a dual biography. Verlaine's poetry is too often overlooked by admirers of the older man's more charismatic and innovative protégé. Mr White is also right to point out that, critically speaking, Verlaine now seems perfectly digested, while Rimbaud, ever the outlaw, remains ‘inedible’. Deliciously so, he might have added.”
— The Economist
“Here is a lean, incisive biographical-critical book by one of our outstanding literary commentators. In compelling personal writing, White shows how one of the heroes of French culture, Arthur Rimbaud, lead a double life—in many forms. . . This is a disturbing and original portrait of a man White sees as a fallen angel who misbehaved even in hell.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This is a wonderful biography, filled with energy and life, driven as if by a lightning flash. It is also bolstered by fine literary criticism that is effortlessly introduced into the narrative of a quixotic life. . . At the age of 37 he died a convert to Catholicism, and lies buried in the family crypt. He had come full circle, but it was a circle of fire and suffering. This book contains it.”
— Peter Ackroyd, The Times (London)
“It was by harnessing his wild imagination to an informed sense of poetic history that Rimbaud came so rapidly to artistic maturity. Describing the boy's first encounters with literary Paris, White evokes a cultural moment when his physical filthiness and open homosexuality were no more shocking than his hostility to the Alexandrine line.”
— Times Literary Supplement (UK)
“White's homage to Arthur Rimbaud is a fusion of memoir, biography and literary criticism. With a novelist's eye for telling detail, he forges a compelling account of the poet's tempestuous two-year affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine, noting everything from Rimbaud's insistence on playing piano awfully, to Verlaine and his paramour stabbing each other with knives wrapped in towels.”
—Robert Collins, The Observer (UK)
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About the Author
Credit: Bob Peterson