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Greeting

What's it about?
Rimbaud is a biography of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, a precocious schoolboy who became one of Europe's most shocking and innovative poets. It was this brief, five-year period as the enfant terrible of French literature what made him famous but - this is only a small side of Rimbaud's story.

Lulu: The book has been written by Graham Robb.
Lulu: Ein paar einleitende Worte zum Ablauf (Übersicht «choosen book» zeigen)
Lulu: Buchstruktur & Inhaltsangabe
.....

(Iris)
The brief five-year period as the enfant terrible of French literature

* 20. Oktober 1854 in Charleville; † 10. November 1891 in Marseille

Rimbaud was born in Charleville F and lived in this house.

As I said it was only five years Rimbaud was writing. He gave it up before he was 20. 

Precocious and gifted

• His carreer began when in 1865 he went to the college of Charleville. He was always distinguished with prices at the end of the year. Very young he read a lot and wrote poems and rhymes. As an only fourteen year old three of his poems were printed in the teacher's magazine.


• Arthur was eleven months younger than his brother Frederic. While Frederic plodded along at the bottom of the class, Arthur was catapulted into the year above, 


• but he didn't do the school leaving examination called Baccalauréat. (He wanted to make it up when he was much older but that was not possible anymore).


• ghostwriter What we can read everyday in the newspaper, he did already 150 years ago.


• Ghostwriting: I just read a book part (p. 29) for although show you how the book sounds: Rich pupils who were also lazy or incompetent hired Arthur Rimbaud to write their Latin Homework for them. Each piece of homework had its own distinctive style, tailored to the customer. When they read out their ghostwritten homework in class, dim-witted pupils sounded like ridiculously brilliant parodies of themselves. 


• This parasitic service industry feeding on the education system is a splendid achievement for a child of fifteen. Rimbaud had a keen eye for the needs of the market. Who wonders when he got a successful businessman and rich man later?


• Georges Izambard was a young teacher at the college. He got a mentor of Rimbaud. He borrowed him books from new authors, such as «Les Misérables» from Victor Hugo as a regime and church critic.  

• At this time he got issues with his mother. > characters  

• She tried to avoid Arthur from reading books like «Les misérables» of Victor Hugo. She sent Izambard a letter to not give him books like that. «Victor Hugo was an enemy of Church and State which had quite properly been thrown out of France» she said.

• Rimbaud read all the books of the town library.


• He got knowledge of illicit (illegal) literature by going to the bookshop and taking the book he wanted on credit, read it without cutting the pages, then return it the next day and exchanged it.

Rimbaud was born in Charleville. After his second trip to Paris in February 1871 he went back by feet!

• The bookshops of Charleville were a poor source of subversive literature so he ran away to Paris in August 1870 for find new books there. It was his first trip to Paris without ticket and money and ended in the prison. Izambard bought him off, sent him a ticket back to Charleville and organised an accommodation by friends considering Rimbauds upset mother.

• In February 1871 he started a second trip to Paris, grubbed there in bookshops and went back to Charleville by feet!


• Rimbaud sympathised with the «Paris Commune». The Paris Commune was a radical socialist and revolutionary government that ruled Paris for two months from 18 March to 28 May 1871 against the will of the conservative central government.





The Parish avant-garde and Commune was masterminded by the republicans.








 

The seer 
Seer: Letter May 1871

• His mother tried to persuade him all the time to learn a profession. He didn't even though he was financially kept painfully short from her. Rather he wrote poems in an increasingly provocative unpoetical style and caged himself in his own imagination world. 


• At this time he wrote his famous «Letters of the seer», «lettres du voyant», one of the sacred texts of modern literature. The first was sent to Izambard at the 13 May 1871 and the second longer letter to Denemy two days later. They contained the equation «I is somebody else», «Je est un autre», E = mc2 and this is probably the most frequently misunderstood sentence in French literature.


• On a first reading it hardly seems to deserve such a grand title. «Letter of a the excited shoolboy» would give a more accurate impression. 


• The main points appear to be these: 1. the true poet is a seer but a seer who creates new realities and becomes the pioneer of a new race. 2. The poet-seer will create a new universal language - and so on.

• He understood to be a kind of a medium of the poetry.

• He is characterising the poet as a versing seer and complying a higher  kind of order which send him in ecstasies and foreign regions of imagination and insight and going beyond himself.

• Rimbaud read all books what he could find and got bored of all authors except of Victor Hugo, Charles Beaudelaire and Paul Verlaine. 

Relationship with Paul Verlaine

• Verlaine was the only living seer

• Rimbaud was sick of Charleville and was a devoted (ergeben) admirer of Verlaine's poetry. He wished to come to Paris. 

• In September 1971 he sent a letter to Verlaine and enclosed five poems and waited for a reply.

• Verlaine was young, 26, but already established in Paris.

• Verlaine was impressed of Rimbauds poems.

• Verlaine were spreading the word «a new star had risen in the east. Rimbaud was already being talked about in Paris. It was generally agreed that the Charleville prodigy should been brought to the capital as soon as possible and offered financial support. Then came the letter that changed anything. The red carpet was rolled out for Rimbaud: «Come dear great soul. We await you: we desire you.»The envelope contained a money- order for a one-way ticket to Paris.

• In between and while waiting for the apply Rimbaud had written a 100 lines poem to show to the people in Paris. Le bateau ivre:

(...)
If I long for any European water, it is for the black,
Cold puddle where, as the scented twilight falls,
A squatting infant, full of sadness, releases
A boat as frail as a May butterfly.
(...)

• quite regular verse
• extraordinary content
• a bout tells its adventures since the massacre of its crew
• its astounding visions and its gradualy disintegration

• Rimbaud went to Paris on 24 September 1871, a month before his seventeenth birthday.


• He lived with Verlaine with his very pregnant wife Mathilde.


• Verlaine was 10 years older than Rimbaud.

• Given up his job, taken up drinking, in danger of being imprisoned for his role in the Commune.

• Verlaine's son was born in October  and at the same time there was beginning a gay relationship between Rimbaud und Verlaine. The family was disgusted and Rimbaud moved back to Chareville in February 1872 like a castaway (Verstossener) 

• After this kind of escape his poems showed disappointment and uncertainty and showed at the same time a new style of writing with texts appearing nonsensical and without need of formal correct rhymes.

• While Verlaine was a great poet, Rimbaud was a genious - a revolutionary. His poems from age 16 to the age of 19 forever changed the face of modern poetry. 

• In Mai 1872 Rimbaud followed the appeals of Verlaine and went back to Paris. Some weeks later in Juli 1872, they left Paris in direction to the Norh, wandering. They didn't get along well, a lot of ups and downs and separated and came back.

• So they were in London from automn 1872 until Juin1873. 

• Things all came to a head, however, after Verlaine returned one morning from Camden market with a fish and a bottle of oil (bring back that bit of the market, we say!) A smirk from the cocky teen resulted in his older lover retaliating with a swipe across the face with the wet fish. Verlaine then stomped off to Brussels threatening suicide and, after pawning whatever clothes they had left, Rimbaud pursued him to a Brussels hotel, where they had their final row. Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the arm and was eventually jailed for two years.That was rather the end of heir relationship.

• a last meeting: Sichtlich hatte der nunmehr 19-Jährige mit der Literatur inzwischen abgeschlossen. Er begann Klavierspielen zu üben und ging im Februar 1875 nach Stuttgart, mit der Absicht Deutsch zu lernen. Hier erhielt er Besuch von dem vorzeitig entlassenen und mittlerweile zum Katholizismus übergetretenen Verlaine, der ihn zu versöhnen und vergeblich zu der Frömmigkeit zu bekehren versuchte, die ihn selbst im Gefängnis überkommen hatte.
•  

Rimbaud and Verlaine in Camden

End of his poetry:

• In 1891 before his death vernichtete er, offenbar unter dem Einfluss seiner frommen Schwester Isabelle, praktisch alle Materialien aus seiner Zeit als moralisch, politisch und religiös nicht eben korrekter junger Dichter, die er schon seit langem als fern und abgetan betrachtete. 
• Die Nachwirkung Rimbauds setzte ein, als ab 1883 literarische Zeitschriften ohne sein Zutun Werke von ihm abzudrucken begannen, und zwar vor allem auf Initiative Verlaines und nach Texten, die dieser als Autographen oder, wie z. B. das Bateau ivre, in eigenen Abschriften besaß. Verlaine selbst verfasste ein vielbeachtetes literarisches Porträt Rimbauds, das er 1883 in einer Zeitschrift publizierte und 1884 in seinen Band Les Poètes maudits/ Verfemte Dichter aufnahm. Der erste Versuch einer Sammelausgabe der Versdichtungen Rimbauds, die insbesondere auch die frühen Texte enthielt, die Izambard und Demeny besaßen, erschien 1891 wenige Tage vor seinem Tod und zweifellos ohne sein Wissen unter dem seltsamen Titel Le Reliquaire (Der Reliquienschrein).
• Diese Ausgabe selbst wurde anschließend lange von Rimbauds Schwester Isabelle behindert, die sich als Erbin und Sachwalterin ihres Bruders sah und in seinem Sinne zu handeln glaubte, wenn sie alle in ihren Augen anstößigen Texte, auch solche, die schon publiziert waren, auszumerzen versuchte. 1895 kam, schließlich doch mit ihrem Placet, die erste Gesamtausgabe heraus, deren Korpus sich in den nachfolgenden Jahrzehnten immer wieder um neu aufgetauchte Texte vermehrte. Denn Rimbaud hatte häufig Blätter mit Gedichten an Bekannte verschenkt.
  Rückblickend gesehen verdankt er sein literarisches Überleben wohl weitgehend dem Einsatz seines Exfreundes Verlaine, auch wenn dieser sicher ebenfalls davon profitierte.
• rebel artist. the poems he left behind like unwanted luggage turned out to be literary time-bombs
• R has been treated by four generations of avant-gardes as an emergency exit from the house of convention. So he has influenced writers, musicians and artists.