BOOK REVIEW – Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel
The novelist, essayist, and memorialist Edmund White has written an excellent introductory biography of Arthur Rimbaud, the late nineteenth-century poet, who has fascinated modernists for over a century. He presents Rimbaud’s homosexuality as only part of his overall adolescent rebellion, not an identity that Rimbaud embraced and maintained throughout his life. He analyzes Rimbaud’s poetry, especially “The Drunken Boat” and A Season in Hell, with keen insight. And he discusses Rimbaud’s adventures (or misadventures) in Africa with great sympathy.
