Rimbaud: A Biography [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Graham Robb (Author) "MOST ROMANTIC POETS practised surgery on their family trees, grafting on aristocrats and lopping off nonentities..." (more)
Key Phrases: sous une soutane, petites amoureuses, coeur volé, Une Saison, Mme Rimbaud, Arthur Rimbaud (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
When he was not yet 17, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) electrified Paris's literary society with the incendiary poems that later made him the guiding saint of 20th-century rebels, from Pablo Picasso to Jim Morrison. "A Season in Hell," "The Drunken Boat," and the prose poems of Illuminations were epochal works that changed the nature of an art form--and yet their author abandoned poetry at age 21 and spent the rest of his short life as a colonial adventurer in Arabia and Africa. "He was writing in a void," explains British scholar Graham Robb. "In 1876, most of Rimbaud's admirers either were still in the nursery or had yet to be conceived." Hardly surprising, since the poet was a difficult and frequently unpleasant person to actually know. The Parisian poets who took him under their wing soon discovered that Rimbaud was ungrateful, crude, and as scornful of their precious verse as he was of the Catholic Church, bourgeois proprieties, and everything else his disapproving mother held dear. Rimbaud's stormy affair with Paul Verlaine estranged the older poet from his wife and, eventually, from most of his artistic friends as well. In Robb's depiction, the poet possessed from his earliest youth a restless, searching intellect that permitted no compromise with convention nor tenderness for others' weaknesses. The author doesn't soften Rimbaud's "savage cynicism" or gloss over his frequently obnoxious behavior, yet Robb arouses our admiration for "one of the great Romantic imaginations, festering in damp, provincial rooms like an intelligent disease." Like Robb's excellent biographies of Hugo and Balzac, this sharp, subtle, unsentimental portrait is both erudite and beautifully written. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly
In this robust biography, Robb (Balzac; Victor Hugo) contemplates the life of Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) as if the French poet/ vagabond's deeds were those of a mythic hero. Rimbaud's every impulse is viewed as the expression of a coherent, wildly innovative vision of the world; his artistic accomplishments are assumed to have redeemed his devious and destructive tendencies. Thus, when the academically gifted Rimbaud produced other students' homework for a price, the burgeoning genius was operating "a parasitic service industry feeding on the education system," which Robb posits as a "splendid achievement for a child of fifteen." When Rimbaud spread his own excrement on the table of a Parisian caf? as if it were plaster for a fresco, he was making the critical point that "flat canvas and oils could not compete with the three-dimensional kaleidoscope of reality." And when discussing the poet's use of blackmail to secure the attentions of his lover, poet Paul Verlaine, Robb dryly notes that Rimbaud "never allowed conventional morality to ruin a practical arrangement." The author seldom admits ambiguity. He is most effective in his effort to blend Rimbaud's early life as a bohemian social deviant with his subsequent 16-year career in Africa as a fledgling anthropologist and explorer. Rimbaud's childhood wanderings through the French countryside matured into caravans across the deserts. His youthful willingness to venture the unmapped lifestyle of the homosexual prepared him to encounter the exotic cultures of Abyssinia. His literary works, from "Le B?teau ivre" to "Voyelles" and "Une Saison en enfer," invariably focused on fluctuation, on moments of departure. According to Robb, these poems were crowbars that pried Rimbaud loose from family, tradition and society. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 544 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393049558
• ISBN-13: 978-0393049558
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #549,204 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a biography that Rimbaud deserves, September 27, 2000

By	"lexo-2" (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews

Rimbaud's life has been subjected to more myth-making and sentimental drivel than any other 19th century poet, probably because his life is such a great story. Teenage visionary turns thirtysomething gun-runner - what a headline! The great virtue of Graham Robb's biography is that he pays such close attention to the details of Rimbaud's life as it was actually lived, and doesn't allow the work, or indeed the correspondence, to dictate to him the meaning of it all.

The last great English-language Rimbaud biography was Enid Starkie's, now over forty years old, and while Starkie did massive valuable research (she later claimed, in classic biographer-rebel style, that she paid for her research by granting sexual favours to wealthy Frenchmen), her tone and approach were flawed by the temptation to rewrite Rimbaud's entire life in terms of his glittering adolescence, which was after all the time when he produced his poetry. Graham Robb combines an alert and vivid appreciation of Rimbaud's genius with a scepticism about Rimbaud's published statements about himself. This is a portrait of the artist as lifelong liar and shyster, and while Robb's Rimbaud is one of the least attractive heroes ever depicted, it seems all too true in the light of Rimbaud's withering, laser-like intelligence.

While Robb is exceptionally good at showing us the young, anti-social, utterly selfish teenage genius, you can tell from his crisp prose style and sardonic wit that while he admires the poetry, he finds the boy hard to like. This seems eminently fair in view of Rimbaud's youthful lack of any sense of gratitude, morality or decent behaviour. The older Rimbaud was more inclined to honour his obligations, but Robb convincingly demonstrates how the African Rimbaud's repeated complaints of having no money don't square up to his actual dealings with banks. It seems that Rimbaud the arms dealer was not the bungling innocent of legend, but a shrewd operator who made a considerable amount of money.

Robb's Rimbaud is a more modern figure, even a more (gulp) postmodern figure than we're used to in Rimbaud studies. This is no romantic dreamer (despite a dubious epilogue, the only false note in the book, I thought); Rimbaud seems to have dreamed the worst excesses of the 20th century before they happened, and reinvented himself as a man who could feel at home in them. It's a bracing, witty, scrupulous and searching biography of an exemplary figure - the brilliant boy who helped to create our idea of modern literature, and the brutally cynical man who regarded his early achievements as a drastically stupid dead end. The Rimbaud story will always be a fascinating and chilling cautionary tale; exactly what we're being cautioned against is only beginning to become apparent.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid Monstres Sacres, December 1, 2000

By	J. McFarland "jbmcfar" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As Robb did in stellar biographies of Balzac and Victor Hugo, he paints a vivid picture of the immediate environment in which the genius in question grows, rebels, creates and explodes. Much has been written about Rimbaud and his short period of productivity as a brilliant poet and prose-poet, but too much until this biography repeated the same facts, the same received opinions and the same conclusions. Robb digs deeper to provide the fascinating and detailed world of Rimbaud's family, his provincial origins and his rage to create new forms. With that detail, Rimbaud comes spectacularly alive in context. And what a context! Most famously, poet Paul Verlaine stepped into Rimbaud's line of fire and literary history was made, with the young man/boy wreaking havoc in every direction. As Robb shows, Verlaine, Rimbaud's mentor, lover and punching bag, was merely one of those the wild child went after. Robb's prodigious knowledge of the poet, his time and his place in literary history makes this the definitive biography of Arthur Rimbaud. And although hard work, thoroughness and engaged insights are three of Robb's supreme qualities as a biographer, his glorious writing style, which provides every paragraph with exploding epiphanies that illuminate and delight in equal measure, remains a rare treasure among contemporary biographers.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Examining the Rimbaud myth., March 19, 2004

By	C. Gilbert "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Rimbaud: A Biography (Paperback)

An enjoyable book-- well-written and apparently well-researched, if occasionally a little snarky in tone.

Robb has a rare talent (Mitford-esque, if I dare say so) for injecting his point of view in a way that is visible but not overly intrusive. I was glad to have him as a narrative presence throughout the book.

I haven't thought about Rimbaud in years. I read _A Season in Hell_ as a high school student, as you do, but wasn't converted. I never really made a serious effort to engage his poetry or his life. I was motivated to pick this book up after reading a review, and was not disappointed. If you would like to read beyond the tortured artist and into the life of a fascinating and important literary figure, then this is the book for you.

What interested me in reading the biography is how much Rimbaud myth I had unintentionally absorbed over the years. Robb tells the reader a lot about the Rimbaud myth, and I think that many readers are going to find that much of what they thought they knew was not true. He spends a lot of time on the and unwraps the layers for the reader. In that sense, the book also becomes a look at how narrative fictions develop about literary figures. In any case, the facts about Rimbaud are happily much more interesting than the fiction.

The book has inspired me to go back to A Season in Hell and maybe pick up the collected letters. Rimbaud becomes a great deal more interesting if you look at his entire career and not just the period before he turned 19.

Generally: A good read & worth the time.