Rimbaud

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, and 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 anarchy and drug use; gay pioneer; a major influence on artists from Picasso to Bob Dylan..M.F Graham Robb's Brilliant Biography Moves Rimbaud On From His Perpetual Adolescence Where Our Imaginations Have Held Him To Show The Extent Of His Transformations. From Phenomenally Precocious Schoolboy He Became Europe's Most Shocking And Exhilarating Poet, Author Of Poems That Range From The Exquisite To The Obscene. But This Brief, Five-year Period As The Enfant-terrible Of French Literature Is Only One Small Side Of Rimbaud's Story. Robb Takes Us On A Biographical Journey Through Three Continents And Many Different Identities. Rimbaud Emerges From This Stunning Work Of Biographical Scholarship And Historical Imagination As An Even More Complex, Ambiguous And Fascinating Figure Than Ever Before. An astute and engrossing biography from the author of Victor Hugo and Balzac.