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Arthur Rimbaud[ArtUr´ raNbO´] Pronunciation Key, 1854–91, French poet who had a great influence on the symbolists and subsequent modern poets. A defiant and precocious youth, Rimbaud at 16 sent some poems to Verlaine, who liked his work and invited him to Paris. In 1872–73 the two poets lived together in London and Brussels. In a drunken quarrel Verlaine fired a pistol, wounding Rimbaud, and their relationship ended. Rimbaud returned home and finished Une Saison en enfer (1873), a confessional autobiography in which he renounces his former hellish life and his work. At an undetermined time he produced Les Illuminations, consisting of prose poems that transcend all traditional syntax and narrative elements. He probably stopped writing poetry at the age of 19, and thereafter he wandered throughout Europe and N Africa, engaging in numerous business ventures. After the amputation of his leg he died in Marseilles at 37. Rimbaud's poetry has been called hallucinatory because the poet seems to write not of material reality but of his dreamworld; his technique anticipates the symbolists by its suggestiveness, its abstract verbal music, and its images drawn from the subconscious. Le Bateau ivre [the drunken boat] is an outstanding example. Rimbaud's works were published by Verlaine in several posthumous editions, the first complete collection appearing in 1898.
See biographies by E. Starkie (3d ed. 1961, repr. 1968) and G. Robb (2000); studies by W. M. Frohock (1963), W. Fowlie (1966), R. G. Cohn (1974), K. Ross (1980), C. A. Hackett (1981), and C. Nicholl (1999).
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