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Rimbaud

Rimbaud, Jean Arthur, 1854-91, French author.

Suze Rotolo introduced Dylan to the works of Rimbaud:
"I came across one of his letters called "Je est un autre," which
translates into "I is someone else." When I read those words the bells
went off. It made perfect sense. I wished someone would have mentioned
that to me earlier."
Bob Dylan: "Chronicles, vol 1"


MIKE.WILLOUR@f12.n236.z1.fidonet.org: Originally published in the March 1978 Playboy interview with Ron Rosenbaum.

DYLAN: I am interested in all aspects of life. Revelations and realizations. Lucid thought that can be translated into songs, analogies, new information. I am better at it now. Not really written yet anything to make me stop writing. Like, I haven't come to the place that Rimbaud came to when he decided to stop writing and run guns in Africa.
From: ravenflm@primenet.com (charles castell) Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan Subject: Re: Arthur Rimbaud Date: 21 Nov 1996 21:12:02 -0700 RIMBAUD, JEAN ARTHUR: French poet (1854-91) Rimbaud, important as a forerunner of the symbolists and surrealism, abandoned literature before he was 20. A perverse and rebellious genius, he ran away from home at the age of 15 and entered on a life of dissolute wandering. After a brief relatinoship with Verlaine, he forsook writing, supported himself precariously by various activities in Gernmany, the East Indies, and Egypt -- until he finally settled in Abyssinia, where he traded in coffee and slaves, with gun-running as a sideline. The only work which Rimbaud himself published was _A Season In Hell_ (Une Saison en enfer, 1873), a psychological autobiography. _The Illuminations_ (Les Illuminations, written c. 1871, published 1886) consists of both verse and prose poems. His best-known poem is _The Drunken Boat_ (Bateau Ivre). Rimbaud's contribution was to make the role of poetry one of mystic release and revelation and to devise a technique which gave the immediacy of direct sensation to the morbid dream, hallucination, or vision, by the juxtaposition of symbols and images. He deliberately cultivated his world of unreality. "I accustomed myself to simple hallucination" -- before going on to double and triple hallucination. His whole life was a flight from the everyday and the "real" -- his early vagabondage, his brief period of literary activity, and his final years, during which "the adventurer in the real replaced the adventurer in the ideal." His extreme sensibility to the "deep and eternal wound" inflicted by life, is condensed into sharply drawn images grouped about central metaphors. His elliptical compressions and complex rhythms, his use of words for their tone color, his distortions of common meaning and syntax, his use of free verse -- are characteristic techniques deliberately employed to produce the overtones of the vague, mysterious, intuitively sensed, complexities of the life of the mind. -- _Reader's Companion to World Literature_ ISBN: 0-451-62816-0
On Sat, 10 May 1997 00:09:50 GMT, in rec.music.dylan bill.hester@welcom.gen.nz (Bill Hester) wrote: No Dylan content. In the May 1997 Literary Review is a review, entitled "The Real Rambo", by Alain De Botton, on the book "Sombody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91" by Charles Nicholl. In part it says Rimbaud spent very little of his life doing what we most remember him for. Poetry took up a mere five years, and then the author of "A Season in Hell" went to Africa and became a trader, a hard-headed commercial man who dealt in spices, animal skins, coffee, guns, fabrics and perhaps even slaves. For the last sixteen years of his short life (he died at thirty-seven), the poet turned his back on the poetic genius of his adolescence, striving for anonymity in the rough commercial towns of northern Africa. When a trading colleague learnt, through a chance encounter with a traveller from Paris, that Rimbaud's name had become venerated in French poetic circles, Rimbaud told him that the poetry had been an 'ivrognerie' - just a drunken binge. It was the trading, the spices, the guns and the coffee that mattered to him now. .... ....(book's) focus is on Rimbaud who left Europe behind to begin an African life. Moreover, it might be argued, proposes Nicholl, that Rimbaud's life of adventure and wandering in Africa was actually his masterpiece. .... ...."Be it far from me to judge his past as a poet, but I can state with absolute conviction that he was a passionate trader," reported a fellow businessman after his death. ------------------------- bill.hester@welcom.gen.nz
Rimbaud.NeT Rimbaud in Africa

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