Word: rimbaud
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...ARTHUR RIMBAUD-Enid Starkie-Norton...
Between 15 and 19, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry whose slashing irony and pure music still influence poets. At 19 he wrote Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell), an obscure, agonized hodgepodge in which Rimbaud addicts* trace the wrestlings of his André Gide-like puritanism with his André Gide-like passions. But from then until he died, at 37, in a Marseille hospital, Arthur Rimbaud never wrote again. This amazing break with his genius, his lone-wolf prowlings through the lower depths of Europe, his gunrunning in Africa and Asia form a vague, provoking literary legend...
...Rimbaud was brought up by a tight-fisted mother who was open-handed only with her slaps. Until he was 15, she took him to school every day so that he would not tarry with naughty schoolmates. During the dislocations of the Franco-Prussian War, Rimbaud, who was already writing verse, ran away to Paris. There the penniless poet, little more than a pretty-faced child, slept in a barracks: the soldiers "assaulted" him. This shocking experience, which sent him shuddering home, caused not merely a "revulsion," says Author Starkie, but a sensual "revelation." At home, Rimbaud...
...Rimbaud shocked Verlaine's respectable family at once by getting Verlaine drunk every night. When Verlaine's wife found on Rimbaud's pillow "little insects which she had never seen before," her husband laughed. Explained Verlaine: Rimbaud keeps "such parasites in his hair to have them handy to throw on the priests" he passes. But it became necessary for Verlaine to rent a separate room for Rimbaud. There the two poets somewhat absinthe-mindedly achieved that "long et raisonné dérèglement de tons les sens" (long and calculated derangement of all the senses...
...voyage, preferring to go to bed early and get up at dawn, read Conrad, study Malaya, brood upon the remarkable changes since his first trip East 27 years before, and talk with the captain about the lore of the lands they passed. Passing Aden he thought of Rimbaud's tragic fate, and of how strange it was that the Frenchman should be the favorite poet of "a man so immaculate in thought, word and deed as Mr. Anthony Eden." Passing Ethiopia he thought of Conrad, who wrote a chapter of Almayer's Folly in a steamer named Adowa...