Arthur Rimbaud

Who was Arthur Rimbaud?

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet born in Charleville, Ardennes. As part of the decadent movement, he influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. All of his poetry was written as a teenager; he gave up creative writing completely before he turned 20. His "genius, its flowering, explosion and sudden extinction, still astonishes".

Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul. He traveled extensively on three continents before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.

Famous Quotes:

• Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.
• Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.
• When you are seventeen you aren't really serious.
• Only divine love bestows the keys of knowledge.
• What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
• For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.
• One evening I sat Beauty on my knees --And I found her bitter --And I reviled her.
• I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.
• I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.
• I believe that I am in hell, therefore I am there.