Product Description

'Rimbaud, the poet of revolt, and the greatest' Albert Camus Rimbaud is the enfant terrible of French literature, the precocious genius whose extraordinary poetry is revolutionary in its visionary, hallucinatory content and its often liberated forms. He wrote all his poems between the ages of about 15 and 21, after which he turned his back on family, friends, and France to roam the world. In his final years he was a trader in the Horn of Africa. Out of the brief, colourful life and the poetry of sensory wildness has been created the myth of Rimbaud, an enduring icon of youth, rebellion, and freedom. But behind the myth lies a poetic adventure of high ambition and painful rigour, poignant yet heroic. Rimbaud is one of the greatest French poets of all times. This bilingual edition provides all of Rimbaud's poems, with the exception of his Latin verses and some small fragments. It also includes some of his prose pieces, chosen because they offer a commentary on his poetic concerns.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #218295 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Review
...user-friendly parallel text, which makes it the ideal choice for students (The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 )

About the Author
Martin Sorrell has published several anthologies of French verse, translated plays for stage and radio, and has had two original plays and three stories broadcast on BBC radio. For OUP he has translated Verlaine's Selected Poems for OWC.

Customer Reviews

A thrilling look inside the mind of an insane genius
Rimbaud's poetry is generally dark, and disheartening but when considering the fact that it was all written in his adolescence, its genius is undeniable. His fantastic command of surreal imagery and twisted metaphors is amazing to read, yet the undercurrents of a genius-mind evidently tortured and twisted out of all recognition is as disturbing as it is enthralling. You may well find yourself somewhat regretting and yet still enjoying reading this collection. (Note, even if you have no knowledge of French, READ THE FRENCH! Much of the power of the poetry comes from its rhythm which is lost in translation)

Competent, but not startling.
One phrase which is used endlessly in literature is 'enfant terrible', and it is a phrase which has often been used to describe Arthur Rimbaud.

I personally don't regard him as a stand-out poet. His poetry contains a lot of vivid imagery, a lot of classical allusions and many other poetic techniques such as alliteration and assonance, but his subject matter is often juvenile. This doesn't surprise me considering he was only a very young man when wrote most of them.

There are moments of incredible beauty, granted, but there are also moments of incredible crudeness, where he desrcibes disgusting bodily functions in even more disgusting vernacular. Such poems were hardly worthy of being published, and definitely not worthy of being hailed as genius.

The publishing industry loves to 'create' heroes, especially if they are from the correct background, which Rimbaud was. Unfortunately, Rimbaud was no hero, he was just a reasonably competent poet who wrote a few decent poems. That's about it.