Arthur Rimbaud

Selected Works in Translation

By Arthur Rimbaud

2016

First Published

4.30

Average Rating

254

Number of Pages

7H45M

Audio Length

Rimbaud’s poetry developed and extended the symbolist legacy of Baudelaire, who with apolitical intensity had responded to the challenge of modernity in verse embodying a new and darker vision. Rimbaud in his early verse expresses a lyrical and sensuous relationship with his subject matter, using conventional verse forms as Baudelaire had, to explore unconventional, modernist patterns of thought and behaviour. While seemingly adolescent in some respects, the poetry is also astoundingly mature, both as poetry and in exposing his underlying discontent with French provincial life and culture. In his later work, Rimbaud used prose as a poetic medium to express a mounting disgust with conventional existence and the deadened spiritual state of nineteenth-century Europe, in an extremist, semi-incantatory mode of literature, aimed at deranging the senses while provoking the intellect. It is a form of writing that strongly influenced the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, which further challenged common sense and extolled the dislocation of perception. The energy that produced the poetry was then directed elsewhere. Through disgust with his previous existence and the artificiality of literature, through an inability perhaps to take the content of his poetry any further creatively, Rimbaud abandoned his writing, in symbolic renunciation, and effectively submerged himself in the practical world of trade and in alien cultures, an inner move towards the greater immediacy and emotional simplicity of those cultures paralleled in the arts by Baudelaire earlier and Gauguin later. Published by Poetry in Translation .

Avg Rating

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Author

Arthur Rimbaud

Author · 24 books

Hallucinatory work of French poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud strongly influenced the surrealists. With known transgressive themes, he influenced modern literature and arts, prefiguring. He started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian war. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. After assembling his last major work, Illuminations , Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 years in 1874. A hectic, violent romantic relationship, which lasted nearly two years at times, with fellow poet Paul Verlaine engaged Rimbaud, a libertine, restless soul. After his retirement as a writer, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant and explorer until his death from cancer. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell , a precursor to modernist literature.