a load of shit" and turned away in Disgust.
Rimbaud was born in 1854 in Charleville in a region near the Belgium border. Charleville was a small provincial town. He detested the place, and when he was older, the people of Charleville detested him. In his earliest poetry, he often attacked the petty restrictions of small town life which he saw as working to frustrate his poetic ambitions. He had a precocious verbal ability as a child, and he produced such accomplished Latin verses that he often won prizes. The world of literature contrasted with that of Charleville--where Charleville was dull, the world of literature was filled with adventure and excitement.
The cult of Rimbaud has grown over the years, and he had a major influence on a number of poetic movements and several generations of poets. More recently, his story has been resurrected in different forms, as Roger Clarke noted in 1997:
Last month, the Richard Alston Dance Company toured with Visions, a Rimbaudian inspired dance and, on her comeback tour last year, Patti Smith interrupted her show in London to read from the Rimbaud oeuvre. And had she switched on the TV, she would have seen Eric Cantona finding "room to breathe" on the Eurostar while ostentatiously reading a book of Rimbaud's poems (as does the Terence Stamp character reading on the lawn in Teorema- Pasolini was of course another Rimbaud fan). Cantona puzzled many tabloid hacks at a famous press conference in a now celebrated monologue involving "seagulls" and "trawlers." Little did the sports journalists realize that their idol was giving them a masterclass in Rimbaudian imagery.
More recently, the story of Rimbaud and Verlaine has been the subject of a film that capitalized on the literary interest in Rimbaud and on a certain prurient interest in his homosexual transgressions at the same time:
Director Agnieszka Holland has packed it all into Total Eclipse, his harsh presentation ...