Arthur Rimbaud turned French poetry on its head in his late teens.
He took the Baudelairean medium of the prose poem, injected adolescent rage, slang and a remarkable inventiveness with language to create his visionary masterpiece A Season in Hell and a shimmering collection of Illuminations.
His work influenced everyone from the modernists and the Beats to Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, but he wasn’t recognized or well-liked in his lifetime.
He guzzled absinthe, sponged money off his friends, and wrecked the life of fellow poet Paul Verlaine.
And then he renounced poetry at age 20 and simply walked away.
The last we hear of him, he’s somewhere in Africa living as a trader and gunrunner — and for a while, that was all we knew.
The book we’re talking about today reveals what happened to him next.
Charles Nicholl is the author of Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1890-91, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma, and The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a recipient of the Hawthornden prize and has won the James Tait Black prize for biography. He’s also presented television documentaries.
We spoke about the allure of Rimbaud the poet, his ‘lost years’ in Africa, and his late reputation as a traveler and Arabist.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
Charles’s BBC television program No Direction Home
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