Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Arthur Rimbaud

The poetry of Arthur Rimbaud is often explained in terms of his biography. Such an approach is often used for literary figures, though many critics find that it is less important than the form and content of the literary works themselves. In the case of Rimbaud, however, the relationship between his life and his work has become a focus because he seems to have lived in a way that expressed certain poetic and non-conforming attitudes, while it is also possible to find a number of links between Rimbaud's life and certain images that recur in his poetry: "A revolutionary both in his life and in his art, Rimbaud exerted a radical influence on the scope and direction of French poetry." As a poet, Rimbaud is considered innovative, and his accomplishment as a poet is all the more remarkable considering how little he wrote and how young he was when he died. He is indeed known as the poet who stopped writing poetry as a matter of choice. An issue that can be raised with reference to his poetry is the role of normalcy in his word and the way transgression is treated, transgression from the social norms such as can be seen in his life and specifically in his homosexual relationship with Verlaine.

For Rimbaud, poetry itself was a form of transgression, taking him away from what he considered a normal life and putting him through a certain kind of strain and terror. This was the reason why he gave up poetry and escaped to something he considered normalcy, though it might be argued that the real transgression came from his own nature and not from his poetry as such:

Every writer sometimes entertains the fantasy of "giving up writing for ever", but Rimbaud actually did it-he pushed the artistic selfdestruct button. On his deathbed, nursed by a sister unaware that he had even been a poet, the family doctor at Roche casually asked his bedridden patient about his work written 15 years earlier. The great poet merely rasped "poetry is...

Page 1 of 11 Next >

More on Arthur Rimbaud...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Arthur Rimbaud. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:27, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1709001.html