RIMBAUD, JEAN-ARTHUR. - French poet, b. at Charleville on 20 Oct. 1854, d. at Marseilles on 10 Oct. 1891.
Forced to grow up in a petty-bourgeois and austere environment, deprived of family affection, he reacted violently from adolescence onward; at 16 he ran away from home; later, in Paris, he enlisted in the francs-tireurs of the Commune. In 1871 he joined Verlaine (v.) in Paris, with whom he had formed a close friendship, bringing tragedy into the latter's family life. With him he fled to England and Belgium, living in misery, until that dramatic separation in which R. was wounded by his friend. After Une saison en enfer, one of the masterpieces of modern French prose, was published in 1873, R. began a life of wandering throughout Europe, in Sumatra, then in Africa and particularly in Ethiopia. Having returned to France in 1891 because of the illness that had struck him (a cancer of the knee), he died at Marseilles, after a long agony, attended by his sister. It seems that in his last days he returned to the Faith.
R. the «poète maudit» was presented by Verlaine in 1883: the Illuminations came out in 1886, the Poésies complètes, posthumously, in 1895. After his first verses, of Parnassian tone, he sought to create «un verbe poétique accessible un jour ou l'autre à tous les sens», to write «des silences», to «noter l'inesprimable» (Alchimie du verbe). He attempted, as Baudelaire had already done, to «give» the deepest meaning of reality, but did not succeed: it was then that, disappointed, R. abandoned literature for travel.
To his poetry, «an explosion of a most personal lyrical temperament» that sometimes reaches the highest peaks, prodigiously created between the ages of 16 and 19, the French Surrealists drew close, during and after the First World War, first among them Guillaume Apollinaire.