Arthur Rimbaud
About the Author
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
Born: October 20 1854, Charleville, France
Died: November 10, 1891, Marseille, France
Years Active: 1870-1891
Literary Movement: Symbolism
Écouter "Ma Bohème"
Online Resources
- ProQuest Literature Online | Arthur Rimbaud Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
- Literature Resource Center Online | Arthur Rimbaud Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- The Literary Encyclopedia | Arthur Rimbaud Biographical information, short pieces of writing on the author, links to other resources
- The Poetry Foundation | Arthur Rimbaud Biography, poems, and literary criticism.
Books on Rimbaud at CBB
Rimbaud (2000) by
Unknown Beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, a reinventor of language and perception, a breaker of taboos. The list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his published poems. But his posthumous career is even more astonishing: saint to symbolists and surrealists; poster child for anarchy and drug use: gay pioneer; and a major influence on such artists as Picasso, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison. At the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud turned his back on his artistic achievement. For his remaining sixteen years he lived in exile, ending up as a major explorer and arms trader in Abyssinia. The genius of Graham Robb's account is to join the two halves of this life, to show Rimbaud's wild and unsettling poetry as a blueprint for the exotic adventures to come. This is the story of Rimbaud the explorer, in mind and in matter.
Call Number: Miller PQ2387.R5 Z825 2000ISBN: 0393049558
- Author Search: Rimbaud | CBB Catalog A complete author search of all Colby books on and by Rimbaud.
Relationship with Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine & Arthur Rimbaud. Image courtesy of Pinterest.
- The Poetry Foundation | Paul Verlaine Biographical information on Verlaine, including his tumultuous relationship with a teenage Rimbaud.
- "How 555 Nights in Jail Helped to Make Paul Verlaine a 'Prince of Poets'" | The Guardian Essay on how Paul Verlaine's time in prison, punishment for shooting his lover Arthur Rimbaud, shaped his poetic influence.
- Paul Verlaine: The Mentor, Creator, and Destroyer of Rimbaud | Culture Trip Further information on the tumultuous, abusive relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud.
- The Rimbaud & Verlaine Foundation The Rimbaud and Verlaine Foundation was launched in 2014 to take advantage of the legacy gift of the property at No 8 Royal College Street in Camden in London, once home to the French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. One of the Foundation’s long-term objectives is to turn No 8 into a European style ‘poetry house’, providing an educational and cultural resource for schools and the community in Camden.
Important Works
Une Saison en Enfer / A Season in Hell (1945) by
"At 16, 17, 18 Rimbaud transformed French poetry, completely modernized it." -Allen Ginsberg
"Every writer produces some haunting passages, some memorable phrases, but with Rimbaud they are strewn all over the pages like gems tumbled from a rifled chest." --Henry Miller
"Our greatest poet of revolt." --Albert Camus
Call Number: Miller PQ2387.R5 S3
Une saison en enfer, &, Le bateau ivre = A season in hell, &, The drunken boat (1961) by
"Le Bateau ivre" is a 100-line verse-poem written in 1871 by Arthur Rimbaud. The poem describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism.
A Season in Hell is an extended poem in prose written and published in 1873 by French writer Arthur Rimbaud. It is the only work that was published by Rimbaud himself.
Call Number: Colby PQ2387.R5 S3 1961b
Prose Poems from the Illuminations (1946) by
The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varese. Mrs. Varese first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations. This edition also contains two other series of prose poems, which include two poems only recently discovered in France, together with an introduction in which Miss Varese discusses the complicated ins and outs of Rimbaldien scholarship and the special qualities of Rimbaud’s writing. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. While he was working on them he spoke of his interest in hallucinations––"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were caught by the poet in a beam of pellucid, and strangely active language which still lights up––now here, now there––unexplored aspects of experience and thought.
Call Number: Miller PQ2387.R5 I4 1946
Oeuvres Completes (1946) by
Complete poems of Arthur Rimbaud
Call Number: Miller PQ2387 .R5 1988ISBN: 2070104761
Collected Poems (2001) by
'Rimbaud, the poet of revolt, and the greatest' Albert CamusRimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. He wrote all his poems between the ages of about 15 and 21, after which he turned his back on family,friends, and France to roam the world. In his final years he was a trader in the Horn of Africa. Out of the brief, colourful life and the poetry of sensory wildness has been created the myth of Rimbaud, an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom. But behind the myth lies a poetic adventureof high ambition and painful rigour, poignant yet heroic. Rimbaud is one of the greatest French poets of all times.This bilingual edition provides all of Rimbaud's poems, with the exception of his Latin verses and some small fragments. It also includes some of his prose pieces, chosen because they offer a commentary on his poetic concerns.
Call Number: Miller PQ2387.R5 A285 2001ISBN: 0192833448
