RIMBAUD, JEAN-ARTHUR. – French poet, born in Charleville on 20 October 1854, died in Marseille on 10 October 1891.
Compelled to grow up in a petty-bourgeois and austere environment, devoid of familial affection, he reacted violently from adolescence onward; at the age of 16 he ran away from home; later, in Paris, he enlisted in the franc-tireurs of the Commune. In 1871 VERLAINE, PAUL (v.) in Paris, with whom he had formed a close friendship, bringing tragedy into the latter’s family life. He fled with him to England and Belgium, living miserably, 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. embarked on a life of wandering throughout Europe, in Sumatra, and then in Africa, particularly Ethiopia. He returned to France in 1891 because of the illness that had afflicted him (cancer of the knee) and died in Marseille,
after a long agony, attended by his sister. It seems that during his final days he returned to the Faith.
R., the «poète maudit», was presented by Verlaine in 1883: the Illuminations appeared in 1886, and the posthumous Poésies complètes in 1895. After his first verses, which were Parnassian in tone, he sought to create «un verbe poétique accessible un jour ou l'autre à tous les sens», to write «des silences», «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 highly personal lyrical temperament» that sometimes reaches the loftiest heights, prodigiously created between the ages of 16 and 19, the French Surrealists drew close during and after the First World War, foremost among them Guillaume Apollinaire.