In Marseille on November 10, 1891, after the amputation of his right leg, the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud died of an infection at the age of thirty-seven.
One of the "cursed" poets who changed poetry and art has died; he wished to reinvent love.
Jean Cocteau wrote about him: “Arthur Rimbaud was the most extraordinary being ever to traverse the earth.”
René Char, on the other hand, said that Rimbaud was “the first poet of a civilization yet to be born,” while Albert Camus considered him “a great and admirable poet, the best of his time, a dazzling oracle.”
Even more exalted were the tones used by Aldo Palazzeschi and the journalist and literary critic Félix Fénéon; for the former, Rimbaud was “the most astonishing, unsettling, and insoluble case in poetry, Arthur Rimbaud stands apart, without the natural kinships that all poets have among themselves.” The latter simply defined him as a poet who is “beyond all literature, and probably above it.”
After him, poetry would never be the same again, as Rimbaud was able to radically transform its language.
Hundreds of pages would not be enough to recount the art and life of this extraordinary artist.
Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry from ages 15 to 19, denigrated the respectability of his homeland, ran away from home, attacked the State and institutions, burst into the artistic world of his time with an energy never seen before, outraged the bourgeoisie, mocked religion, repudiated morality, established a scandalous relationship with poet Paul Verlaine, ended up in prison, renounced the formal canons of poetry, shattered the poetic culture of his time, and observed with precision the existential issues of his era as no other poet could have. He was the quintessential romantic rebel, participated in the Paris Commune, wandered throughout Europe, and theorized the social function of the visionary poet and gnente... (quotes taken here and there)
“I ended up finding sacred
the disorder of my mind.”
.: Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud :.
