RimbaudRimbaud
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Book, 1987
Current format, Book, 1987, , No Longer Available.Book, 1987
Current format, Book, 1987, , No Longer Available. Offered in 0 more formats"Arthur Rimbaud, one of France's greatest poets, was published at the age of fifteen, achieved instant fame among the Parisian literary avant-garde, then abruptly abandoned his writing career only five years later. The mystery surrounding these events helped to make him a legendary figure well before his death in 1891. Although over 300 books and articles have been written on Rimbaud, many of them have focused only on the sensational aspects of his life--his rebellious childhood, his homosexuality, and his experiences with drugs, Hinduism, and the occult. Pierre Petitfils, the leading French authority on Rimbaud, eschews all parti pris to give us an unvarnished account of everything that is known of the enigmatic existence of the poet. Published in English for the first time, this new biography gives detailed accounts of Rimbaud's childhood with his tyrannical mother on a farm in northern France; the escape to Paris in his early teens; his violent love affair with Verlaine (who left his wife and family for Rimbaud and was later thrown into a Belgian prison for shooting him); Rimbaud's discovery of the Middle East; his last ten years in Africa; and finally his return to Marseille to die at the age of thirty-seven. The accumulation of facts, based on thirty years' research into documents and testimonies of contemporary eyewitnesses, produces a more plausible explanation of Rimbaud's life than any amount of interpretation. Petitflils reveals, for example, that Rimbaud was not only his school's enfant terrible but also its most brilliant student, and that the poet did not turn his back on writing. (In fact, there are witnesses to the fact that he spent hours of most days writing, often late into the night.) He also gives a detailed and substantiated account of Rimbaud's years in the Middle East and Africa. This is the first biography of Rimbaud to be written since the late 1930s and the first ever to be based on such exhaustive research."--Dust jacket.
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- Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1987.
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