Rimbaud: Poet and Adolescent Hero

Many writers and aspiring writers, as well as avid readers, have fancied themselves bohemian, avant garde, scornful of convention, and a bit outrageous. One of the most prominent models for such a stance was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who has attained an almost mythic status in literature. Born in 1854, Rimbaud wrote his intense, dramatic poetry -- including his best known work, “A Season in Hell” -- between the ages of 15 and 20, and then, shockingly, stopped writing. An article by Daniel Mendelsohn in the 8/29/11 New Yorker describes Rimbaud’s drab, conventional background, and how he rebelled against and escaped it and went to Paris several times before he finally was able to stay there. He “let his hair grow long, sat around mocking the passing bourgeoisie, and smoked his clay pipe a lot.” (It sounds like the sixties in the United States!) He wrote shocking poems, sometimes about scatological topics. But, as the article says, he also carefully studied the history of poetry, and wrote dazzling, iconoclastic poetry. This precocious poet became the lover of the poet Paul Verlaine. They had a stormy, even destructive relationship, but meanwhile Rimbaud’s poetry matured. He became famous, but at the age of 20, stopped writing poetry, moved home to his mother’s farm, and then moved to Aden and East Africa, becoming a trader, far from the literary scene. His renunciation of poetry at such a young age has always been a great mystery. One theory is that he simply outgrew adolescence and all its intensity. In any case, his poetry, his outrageous behavior, and the whole mythology about him still have a powerful influence. The poet and singer Patti Smith says that when she was sixteen, “my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbuad’s ‘Illuminations,’ which I kept in my back pocket…[It] became the bible of my life.” Mendelsohn concludes that not only was Rimbaud himself an adolescent when he wrote his poetry, but he also appeals most of all, in a very visceral way, to adolescents, as it is “the urgency, the orneriness, the rebellion” of adolescence that they find reflected in his work. I will only add that adolescents always seem to admire and imitate, and/or fall in love with, the “bad boys,” whether they ride motorcycles or write defiant (but perfectly formed) poetry. So here’s to the beautiful, original, rebellious, obnoxious, brilliant, destructive, charismatic genius, Rimbaud!