JEAN-ARTHUR RIMBAUD. — French poet, born in Charleville on 20 Oct. 1854, died in Marseilles on 10 Oct. 1891.
Forced to grow up in a petty-bourgeois and austere environment, lacking family affection, he reacted violently from adolescence onwards; at 16 he ran away from home; later, in Paris, he enlisted in the francs-tireurs of the Commune. In 1871 he reached Paris and joined Verlaine (q.v.), 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 miserably, until that dramatic separation in which R. was wounded by his friend. Published in 1873, Une saison en enfer is one of the masterpieces of modern French prose. R. then began a life of wandering throughout Europe, in Sumatra, then in Africa and particularly in Ethiopia. Returning to France in 1891 because of the illness that had struck him (cancer of the knee), he died in Marseilles after a long agony, attended by his sister. It seems that in his final days he returned to the Faith.
Verlaine presented R. as the “poète maudit” in 1883: the Illuminations appeared in 1886, and the Poésies complètes posthumously in 1895. After his early verses, of Parnassian tone, he sought to create a poetic language accessible to all the senses, to write “silences,” to “note the inexpressible” (Alchimie du verbe). Like Baudelaire before him, he attempted to “give” the deepest sense of reality, but failed; it was then, disappointed, that R. abandoned literature for travel.
His poetry, an “explosion of an intensely personal lyrical temperament” that sometimes reaches the highest peaks, prodigiously created between the ages of 16 and 19, was later embraced by the French surrealists during and after the First World War, first and foremost by Guillaume Apollinaire.