Content uploaded by Kevin Anthony Brown
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Kevin Anthony Brown on Jan 30, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
1/29/2020 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/pierre-petitfils/rimbaud-2/print/
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/pierre-petitfils/rimbaud-2/print/ 1/1
Kirkus Reviews
RIMBAUD
By
Pub Date: Oct. 1st, 1987
Publisher: Univ. Press of Virginia
Arguing that, amid all the hagiographies and deconstructions, no tree life
has yet been written of the man who almost single-handedly subverted
French poetry, Petitfils, a leading Rimbaud authority, has attempted a
definitive biography study--but come up with a prosaic effort. In the light
of pioneering research, and in exhaustive detail, he recounts the successive
and hitherto hidden lives of our poet of delirium and sensual derangement--
that prototype of the poÉte maudit: the unruly provincial schoolboy,
enfant terrible of the local lycÉe; the peasant newly arrived in bohemian Paris; the hindu-homo-
hashiste home. wrecker, eloping with Paul Verlaine (a married man and father) to Brussels and London;
and, finally, the legendary poetic apostate who, seeming to have abandoned literature entirely by the ripe
old age of 19--having already written the Illuminations and A Season in Hell and revolutionized French
letters in the process--set out for exotic Asia upon a mystic March into the Sun before he turned gun-
running mercenary in Africa, finally to surface in Marseille to die at 37. But while this action/adventure
story must make for breathless reading among the timid archivists, it gives the rest of us no clue as to how
pivotal a position Rimbaud--coming between Baudelaire and the generation of 1870 (Proust, ValÉry,
Colette)--occupies in both the history of literature and sensibility. Readers need to know the work--here
made pretext instead of subtext--to know just how little light is shed upon it by this life.