Synopsis "The Divine Brat: A Tribute to Arthur Rimbaud"

Arthur Rimbaud was an infamous legend in his own time, a young boy-genius who changed the face of modern poetry forevermore with his groundbreaking, horrific and surreal vision of A Season in Hell. His lifestyle, up until his twentieth year, was one of a vagabond poet, a sexual libertine, and a young man whose roaring talent burned out before his twentieth year. Dying tragically at the age of 37, Rimbaud has come to exemplify what it means to be an explorer on the outer edges of artistic experimentation and excess. This small book of his collected poems and essays on his life is meant as a dedication to a man whose shadow looms large over the span of the centuries, and who, as Sartre once said of Jean Genet, was "rotten with genius." A "divine brat," indeed.

Arthur Rimbaud

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Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (Charleville, 1854 - Marseille, 1891) was already considered a genius at just twenty years old thanks to some poems and lyrical prose that drew from his fierce and excessive lifestyle. His transgressive poetry and surreal themes influenced modern literature and arts, such as decadentism and the beat generation. Rimbaud was one of the leading figures of symbolism, the dominant trend in the second half of the 19th century often marked as the beginning of contemporary lyricism.

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