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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, October 1, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography (Paperback)
By the time Arthur Rimbaud had reached the age of nineteen, he had already composed dozens of fiery, visionary poems and prose pieces that shattered French concepts of style and content and exerted a vast influence over the role of the artist in the popular imagination. At twenty, however, he had burned many of his poems and had vowed never to write another line. He began to wander Europe and Africa, becoming a gunrunner, a slavetrader, a construction foreman. He was a rebel in the truest sense of the world and his motto could well have been "too fast to live, too young to die." Rimbaud is a remembered for his outrageous behavior as much as for his amazing literary work. Drunk on absinthe, he would insult priests, other poets, casual passersby. He was both unkempt and anti-social, to say the least, but his influence on surrealism cannot be denied and such works as A Season in Hell have exerted tremendous influence over the literary community. Rimbaud's experimentation with language and with imagery is so astounding that the reader is left bewildered and amazed. Rimbaud, in fact, established a new approach to writing. In a letter to a friend, dated 1871, he wrote, "the Poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses." Rimbaud's systematic derangement released all future poets from the bourgeois bonds of the good and evil of conventional morality. For the first time, perhaps, poets felt free to explore the powerful, unarticulated, subconscious regions of the mind. As Rimbaud, himself, wrote in "Alchemy of the Word," "I boasted of inventing, with rhythm from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator...I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still." And so he did. Enid Starkie, who devoted much of her life to the study of this fascinating young rebel, tells us that Rimbaud was disgusted by those who approached poetry as a hobby or a social activity only. These writers, he said, had the soul of a banker or and accountant. "The soul must be made monstrous." Rimbaud believed this with all his heart and he stated it in no uncertain terms. "I say the Poet is therefore truly the thief of fire!" Rimbaud, truly a man possessed of Promethean prowess and stature, also suffered endless torment. He was an outcast, rejected by society, but, though seemingly frail at times, he was really possessed of superhuman strength. It was this emotional strength that allowed him to produce poetry that was both astounding and lasting. Starkie describes how Rimbaud, with his mentor and lover, the poet, Paul Verlaine, became the sensation of both Paris and London as he attacked and insulted poets of the day for, as he put it, murdering the language. He engaged in debauchery of the most astonishing kind, but it was a debauchery that led to a sublime state of artistic creativity seldom achieved. Enid Starkie's biography is wonderful and eminently readable. It stands as the premier chronicle of Rimbaud's life and work. Anyone seeking to understand this complex young man and his equally complex work should read this book. It is, in fact, essential.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Literary Biography, April 13, 2002
This review is from: Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography (Paperback)
Enid Starkie's biography of Rimbaud, published nearly forty years ago, still stands as both the definitive narrative of Rimbaud's life and a model of literary biography. Rimbaud was a rebellious, enigmatic, brilliant, and inscrutable poet who, in just four short years between the ages of sixteen and twenty, wrote the poetry which has made him a figure of mythic proportions, not only in French literature, but in the literature and history of Modernism. Starkie, in brilliantly lucid prose and with loving attention to every detail, tells Rimbaud's life story and connects that story to the writing of the poems and the evolution of Rimbaud's views on poetry and the task of the poet. Influenced by his studies of Kabbalah, alchemy and illuminism, and writing in the long shadow of Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", Rimbaud precociously enunciated his attack on the then dominant Parnassian school of French poetry at the tender age of sixteen. Starkie examines Rimbaud's original aesthetic doctrine in great detail; in her words, the poet must discover a "new language . . . capable of expressing the ineffable, a new language not bound by logic, nor by grammar or syntax." In Rimbaud's words, the "Poet" must make himself a "seer" by a "long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses." From this initial position, Starkie brilliantly details Rimbaud's turbulent relationship with Paul Verlaine and his descent into what one reviewer has aptly described as a "perpetual roister of absinthe, hashish and sodomy." Starkie painstakingly relates Rimbaud's poetry to his experiences with Verlaine in London and Paris. In particular, Starkie convincingly demonstrates, through careful exegesis of the poems and their correspondences with Rimbaud's letters and other biographical materials, that the "Illuminations" (perhaps Rimbaud's most brilliant poems) were written over several years preceding and following "Une Saison en Enfer". Starkie then goes on to demonstrate that the latter prose poems were hardly intended to be Rimbaud's "farewell to literature in general, but only to visionary literature." In other words, "Une Saison en Enfer" represents the rejection by Rimbaud of his original mind-bending iconoclasm--the liquidation "of all his previous dreams and aspirations"--in favor of a rational and materialist aesthetics. Of course, after completing "Une Saison en Enfer", Rimbaud's life moved in completely different directions and there is, unfortunately, no existing evidence that he continued his poetic endeavor after the age of twenty. Starkie's biography captures the details of the remainder of Rimbaud's life--he died at the age of thirty-seven--with fascinating and attentive detail. And the remainder of his life, as related by Starkie, is a biography in itself--vagabond in Europe, sailor to the East Indies, gun runner and (slave?) trader in Abyssinia, and mysterious cult hero of the emerging French symbolist movement. Indeed, in 1888, more than fourteen years after Rimbaud's known literary career had ended, he received a letter from a prominent Parisian editor: "You have become, among a little coterie, a sort of legendary figure . . . This little group, who claim you as their Master, do not know what has become of you, but hope you will one day reappear, and rescue them from obscurity." Starkie scrutinizes all of these events with scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy. This is truly a classic of literary biography! (One additional comment: Rimbaud's poetry and letters are quoted extensively in the original French. If you are not fluent in French, you should have Wallace Fowlie's English translation of Rimbaud's Complete Works and Selected Letters by your side as a reference.)
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Classic of Literary Biography!, June 14, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography (Paperback)
Enid Starkie's biography of Rimbaud, published nearly forty years ago, still stands as both the definitive narrative of Rimbaud's life and a model of literary biography. Rimbaud was a rebellious, enigmatic, brilliant, and inscrutable poet who, in just four short years between the ages of sixteen and twenty, wrote the poetry which has made him a figure of mythic proportions, not only in French literature, but in the literature and history of Modernism. Starkie, in brilliantly lucid prose and with loving attention to every detail, tells Rimbaud's life story and connects that story to the writing of the poems and the evolution of Rimbaud's views on poetry and the task of the poet. Influenced by his studies of Kabbalah, alchemy and illuminism, and writing in the long shadow of Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal", Rimbaud precociously enunciated his attack on the then dominant Parnassian school of French poetry at the tender age of sixteen. Starkie examines Rimbaud's original aesthetic doctrine in great detail; in her words, the poet must discover a "new language . . . capable of expressing the ineffable, a new language not bound by logic, nor by grammar or syntax." In Rimbaud's words, the "Poet" must make himself a "seer" by a "long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses." From this initial position, Starkie brilliantly details Rimbaud's turbulent relationship with Paul Verlaine and his descent into what one reviewer has aptly described as a "perpetual roister of absinthe, hashish and sodomy." Starkie painstakingly relates Rimbaud's poetry to his experiences with Verlaine in London and Paris. In particular, Starkie convincingly demonstrates, through careful exegesis of the poems and their correspondences with Rimbaud's letters and other biographical materials, that the "Illuminations" (perhaps Rimbaud's most brilliant poems) were written over several years preceding and following "Une Saison en Enfer". Starkie then goes on to demonstrate that the latter prose poems were hardly intended to be Rimbaud's "farewell to literature in general, but only to visionary literature." In other words, "Une Saison en Enfer" represents the rejection by Rimbaud of his original mind-bending iconoclasm--the liquidation "of all his previous dreams and aspirations"--in favor of a rational and materialist aesthetics. Of course, after completing "Une Saison en Enfer", Rimbaud's life moved in completely different directions and there is, unfortunately, no existing evidence that he continued his poetic endeavor after the age of twenty. Starkie's biography captures the details of the remainder of Rimbaud's life--he died at the age of thirty-seven--with fascinating and attentive detail. And the remainder of his life, as related by Starkie, is a biography in itself--vagabond in Europe, sailor to the East Indies, gun runner and (slave?) trader in Abyssinia, and mysterious cult hero of the emerging French symbolist movement. Indeed, in 1888, more than fourteen years after Rimbaud's known literary career had ended, he received a letter from a prominent Parisian editor: "You have become, among a little coterie, a sort of legendary figure . . . This little group, who claim you as their Master, do not know what has become of you, but hope you will one day reappear, and rescue them from obscurity." Starkie scrutinizes all of these events with scrupulous attention to detail and accuracy. This is truly a classic of literary biography! (One additional comment: Rimbaud's poetry and letters are quoted extensively in the original French. If you are not fluent in French, you should have Wallace Fowlie's English translation of Rimbaud's Complete Works and Selected Letters by your side as a reference.)
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