Collected Poems pdf Arthur Rimbaud Free Download

Rimbaud is the stuff of legend. A short, intense life, always on the edge, and brought to an early, agonizing end; the consistent refusal to take easy options; the astonishing firmness of will; the deliberate deregulation of the senses; the drugs; the homosexual phase; the arms-dealing in Africa; the slave-trading (unsubstantiated); above all, the astonishing precocity of major poetry written by the age of 21; the subsequent rejection of this poetry—these realities have combined to give Rimbaud a mythic status which, ironically, would have appalled him.

The significant facts1 are these: Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854, in Charleville, north-eastern France, hard by the Belgian border. He was the second of four children. In 1860 his father, an army officer, abandoned them to the less-than-tender mercies of a mother who did not or would not understand the precocious, poetic Arthur. Rebellion seethed in him, but for years he remained the model schoolboy, clever and hard-working. At a very early age he began to write verses, initially in Latin. His brilliant solitude was relieved by the arrival, in 1870, of a young teacher, Georges Izambard, a devotee of poetry. Before long came the first of Rimbaud’s three significant flights from Charleville into Belgium and on to Paris, where he met—and quickly scorned—some of the most influential poets of the day. Aged scarcely 18, he took the poet Verlaine away from his young family and the two went to live together in London. Their turbulent relationship came to a dramatic end some two years later, in 1873, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud, wounding him in the wrist. For a while after that Rimbaud alternated spells on the family farm at Roche, writing some of his major work, with journeys to various places in Europe, undertaken in large part on foot. The last, and longest, phase of Rimbaud’s life, the sixteen years up to his death, was spent almost entirely outside France, in improbable places, doing unlikely work, his back turned resolutely on family, friends, and poetry. Instead, his major concern became to develop trading possibilities in new African markets. However, thanks to his routine disregard for his physical well-being, a tumour that had developed in his right leg rapidly deteriorated, until he had to be brought in agony from the Horn of Africa to France, where the diseased leg was amputated. Still believing he could soon return to Africa, he died in Marseilles in 1891 of a generalized cancer. He was 37.

Early Poems

Rimbaud’s life as a poet was meteoric. It was over in just a few years, roughly from his early teens to the age of 21. As there are problems in giving precise dates for some of his poems, to talk of phases might seem invidious. Nevertheless, what does mark his earliest poems is an amount of imitation and pastiche, of his great, immediate predecessor Baudelaire and of other, lesser contemporaries of the Romantic and Parnassian schools. However, these aspects of his writing disappear as his own poetic voice, audible in fact even in his first poem, becomes more distinctive. Whatever other voices echo in ‘Orphans’ New Year Gifts’, Rimbaud’s own is the loudest. The subject-matter, the unblinking, intelligent gaze, and above all the sadness, hurt, and latent anger are his. Together, they sound the first notes of the song of exclusion he was to sing throughout his writing, and to continue in a different key after he had left poetry behind for good.

In this substantially autobiographical poem, from its title onwards Rimbaud sets himself apart. It is tempting, and probably justified, to attribute in part his ‘orphan’ status to his family life. Biographers are agreed that la mother, as Rimbaud was to call her, was severe and cold. Vitalie Rimbaud (née Cuif) had such darkness in her soul that, late in life, she had herself lowered into the family tomb, between the corpses of Arthur and his sister Vitalie, in order to get a foretaste of what was to come. But life for an abandoned wife with children would have been difficult in mid-nineteenth-century Charleville, whose narrow provincialism Rimbaud later satirized in poems such as ‘To Music’.

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Collected Poems Read Online

INTRODUCTION

Rimbaud: Life and Legend

Early Poems

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