About Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud was a famous french poet born in Charleville, Ardennes. He influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age, while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his teens (17-20). His genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes. Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul. He traveled extensively on three continents before his death from gangrene in his right knee just after his thirty-seventh birthday. On 27 May 1891, his leg was amputated.The least biography of Arthur Rimbaud is twice as thick as his collection of Complete Works. Fortunately, the avalanche of comments he aroused failed to stifle it. Despite the clichés (the Mystery Rimbaud, the Enigma of the brilliant poet who laid down his pen in the flower of his age to become a trader, and his day done, go elsewhere to seek other noises…), we nevertheless continue to celebrate his genius. Everything conspires to alarm the readers of the denial of poetic intuition in favor of an ill-founded lucidity. The phenomenon would have no other consequence than a disastrous renunciation of hope. Can we expect any help from the radicalism of Rimbaud? Just turn to him to find out if help will come from this voice there. Listening to this poetic voice as one grasps a hand. Also do we pay humbly and admiringly our debt to thank him for the Drunk Boat and for A Season in Hell. They offer a model of recovery in the worst moments of collapse. As if helping us to be true to ourselves.
Ver erat : Rimbaud, who owed a lot to Latin, entered into poetry through these two words, incipit of his work which is an amplification of Horace projecting it to both in the past and in the future. Latin verses dating from 1868. Rimbaud was 14 years old. Found in 1932 printed in a school report, as well as some others who succeeded them, they reveal the influence of his passionate readings of the Aeneid and the Georgics. Barely if we should not consider the Latin poetry of Rimbaud as the matrix of the work to come, soaring very seductive. A detail ? Maybe. But at a time when we are about to definitively pass the humanities by loss and profit, we like to make a mountain out of it.
I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.This is a good list of his most great and best poems as a start. All poems below are translated from their original language to english.
Browse all poems and texts published on Arthur Rimbaud
