Rimbaud

"The poet's life was stranger than any fiction: explorer, mercenary, gun runner, and companion to slave traders. Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) has been one of the most destructive and liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. During his lifetime he was a bourgeois-baiting visionary, a reinventor of language and perception, a breaker of all taboos. The list of his known crimes is longer than the list of his published poems. But his posthumous career is even more astonishing: saint to Symbolists and Surrealists; poster-child for…