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rimbaud the double life of a rebel
poet and prodigy arthur rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short but just as dramatically eventful and accomplished . even today over a century after his death in 1891 his visionary poetry has continued to influence everyone from jim morrison and bob dylan to patti smith . his long poem a season in hell 1873 and his collection illuminations 1886 are essential to the modern canon marked by a hallucinatory and hypnotic style that defined the symbolist movement in poetry . having sworn off writing at the age of twenty one rimbaud drifted around the world from scheme to scheme ultimately dying from an infection contracted while running guns in africa . he was thirty seven . edmund white writes with a historians eye for detail driven by a genuine personal investment in his subject . white delves deep into the young poets relationships with his family his teachers and his notorious affair with the more established poet paul verlaine . he follows the often elusive sometimes blatant threads of sexual taboo that haunt rimbauds poems in those days sodomy was a crime and offers incisive interpretations of the poems using his own artful translations to bring us closer to the mercurial poet .