A justly famous biography that captures the essence of Rimbaud. Starkie is especially good at analyzing the poetry, which she quotes liberally. It helps to have a good translation handy, such as Wallace Fowlie's, if one is not fluent in French.

I've read reviews where it is said that Starkie "mothers" her subject, a judgment I find erroneous and offensive. Despite some minor inaccuracies that later scholarship has cleared up (for example, she implies that Rimbaud may have acted as a slave trader in Abyssinia, a claim that has been definitively refuted), this is second only to Rimbaud's own writings for understanding the poet. ( )

One of the best biographies I have ever read.

Rimbaud is by far one of my favourite poets. Before I was 17 I had read everything in print that he ever wrote (letters included). The next logical step was to read everything about him. Luckily around the time I was searching for information on him I visited a used bookstore in DC that had this book. I read it on the roadtrip home and again before I finally put it onto my shelf. Since then I have read dozens of biographies of his and none of them stack up as well as this one. Some of the more recent bios dispute some of the information here, but that is to be expected (after all my copy was printed in the 60's). This is one of the most well researched bios I have ever read, and one of only a handful I have been able to reread. The only problem I can see people having is that when Rimbaud's poems are quoted, they are quoted in the original french, which is no problem if you have studied the language. Unfortunately most people have not. I recommend carrying a copy of the late Wallace Fowlie's translations of Rimbaud's complete works if you wish to read along. ( )

Many of today’s high schoolers do not know, even if they heard of Rimbaud from their teachers, what this poet, who wrote his entire work as a teenager, means for European literature. Today’s teens should read first some of Rimbaud’s poems and then Enid Starkie’s masterpiece. Boy or girl – nobody should be ashamed if falling in love with the poet.

Read this kick ass literary biography back in college soon after I'd "discovered" the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud was a huge influence on Jim Morrison and, being such a faux-poet-Jim-Morrison-wannabe at the time, I was curious to find out why Morrison was so driven to emulate Rimbaud, both artistically and self-destructively. Once I'd read and re-read and unintentionally memorized passages galore of Illuminations, I moved on to A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, the New Directions edition, and completely forgot about Jim Morrison.

Lines from A Season in Hell like "Misfortune was my God" or "I played sly tricks on madness," knocked my impressionable nineteen year-old self out! And I don't think I've ever completely come to since. Thank you, Arthur Rimbaud, for mesmerizing me (and millions others of your French Symbolist adherents) with your radically original visions, and for letting us glimpse inside your divine "notebook from one of the damned".

Enid Starkie, Rimbaud academician extraordinaire, must be paid homage as well for having crafted Arthur Rimbaud, a masterfully written, researched, and scholarly (though never snooty) examination of one of World Literature's most tortured enigmas. Rimbaud's life makes Sylvia Plath's seem a happy and serene one by comparison. How could such a precociously gifted prose poet (and at times, wildly acerbic and satiric personal correspondent to boot) have completely rejected his literary genius barely turned twenty-one, and ultimately end up as an alleged slave trader dead from the untreated effects of syphilis less than twenty years later? Enid Starkie's comprehensive analysis offers all the known clues — and more. I didn't know, for instance, prior to reading Starkie's biography that without Rimbaud's poetry — and particularly the reality shifting ethereal poems in Illuminations — that what became the school of surrealism in art, soon to flourish in France and then the world, would have been denied perhaps its greatest influence.

Arthur Rimbaud is a fascinating read, and includes numerous passages involving Paul Verlaine, and their sordid, on-again-off-again affair. Rimbaud's affair with absinthe and opium is well chronicled too. Starkie pulled no punches while retaining obvious compassion for Rimbaud's sad plight. It's like she was urging him on sometimes, was the vague sense I got, as she brought him to vivid life in her fine writing. Arthur Rimbaud remains a lovely, unflinching, essential biography of Rimbaud the boy, the adolescent poet, the man. ( )

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