Rimbaud completely stopped writing literature at age 20 after assembling his last major work, Illuminations. During his late adolescence and early adulthood, he produced the bulk of his literary output. Born in Charleville, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud ( UK: / ˈ r æ̃ b oʊ/, US: / r æ m ˈ b oʊ/ : 423 French: ( listen) 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism.
The following year, Rimbaud traveled to London with the poet Germain Nouveau, to compile and publish his transcendent Illuminations. The act sent Verlaine to prison and Rimbaud back to Charleville to finish his work on A Season in Hell. Their relationship reached a boiling point in the summer of 1873, when Verlaine, frustrated by an increasingly distant Rimbaud, attacked his lover with a revolver in a drunken rage. By late September 1871, at the age of sixteen, Rimbaud had ignited with Verlaine one of the most notoriously turbulent affairs in the history of literature. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud sent his work to the renowned symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and received in response a one-way ticket to Paris. While he disliked school, Rimbaud excelled in his studies and, encouraged by a private tutor, tried his hand at poetry. Born Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville, France, in 1854, Rimbaud’s family moved to Cours d’Orléans, when he was eight, where he began studying both Latin and Greek at the Pension Rossat. Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death in 1891, Arthur Rimbaud has become one of the most liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. 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. He is best known for A Season in Hell, but his other prose poems are no less remarkable. Yet he had already produced some of the finest examples of French verse. Fired in childhood with an ambition to write, he gave up poetry before he was twenty-one. Rimbaud was indeed the most astonishing of French geniuses.
RIMBAUD ILLUMINATIONS POEMS SERIES
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. Since then she has revised her work and has included two poems which in the interim have been reclassified as part of Illuminations.
Varese first published her versions of Rimbaud’s Illuminations in 1946. They are offered here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varese. 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. The definitive translation of the one of the brightest geniuses of French poetry.
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