***Rimbaud - Graham Robb (2000)

 

"Still another biography of the poet who stopped writing before he was 20! Over a century after his death, the procession of biographers, translators, critics and hagiographers continues. It would seem that no definitive identification can be made (Rimbaud the symbolist, the surrealist, the Bolshevik, Rimbaud the bourgeois, the crook, the pervert, Rimbaud the prophet, the superman, the mystic, Rimbaud the Catholic, the cabalist, the atheist, etc.); the latest 'proved' avatar is forever recycled as evidence -- faulty or secure -- on which to base the next.... What Roland Barthes would call the ''figure'' of Rimbaud is the ghost at the banquet of literature: his radical rejection of poetry (not of writing, as Graham Robb makes clear: correspondence from Rimbaud's last 15 years constitutes a significant share of his output) has been appropriated by literary history as his most enduringly poetic act. ..."
NY Times: There Was Only One Rimbaud
amazon: Rimbaud: A Biography by Graham Robb  

W - Arthur Rimbaud
W - A Season in Hell '
W - The Spiritual Hunt
Open Culture: The Photography of Poet Arthur Rimbaud 
A Day in Rimbaud Land
Quotes from Arthur Rimbaud's Surrealist Writing
NY Times: A Rebel French Poet Draws New Followers to the Hometown He Hated
The Arthur Rimbaud Museum 

NY Times: Where Rimbaud Found Peace in Ethiopia
NY Times: I Is Another
Arthur Rimbaud - Articles - etc.
The New Criterion: Rimbaud, the anarchic demiurge by John Simon
Jack Spicer | After Lorca & A Fake Novel About The Life of Arthur Rimbaud
BBC - Rimbaud and Verlaine: France agonises over digging up gay poets
Arthur Rimbaud: The Discovery of Two New Portraits of the Planetary Poet-laureate. Part 1, Part 2: 
Guardian: Teenage dirtbag
Julian Peters Comics: The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud
YouTube: Patti Smith: Poem about Arthur Rimbaud

Fertile Destabilization: On translating Rimbaud’s Illuminations By John Ashbery
"What are the Illuminations? Originally an untitled, unpaginated bunch of manuscript pages that Arthur Rimbaud handed to his former lover Paul Verlaine on the occasion of their last meeting, in Stuttgart in 1875. Verlaine had recently been released from a term in a Belgian prison for wounding the younger poet with a pistol in Brussels two years earlier. Rimbaud wanted his assassin manqué to deliver the pages to a friend, Germain Nouveau, who (he thought) would arrange for their publication. This casual attitude toward what would turn out to be one of the masterpieces of world literature is puzzling, even in someone as unpredictable as its author. Was it just a question of not wanting to splurge on stamps? (Verlaine would later complain in a letter that the package cost him '2 francs 75 in postage!!!') More likely it was because Rimbaud had decided already to abandon poetry for what would turn out to be a mercantile career in Africa, trafficking in a dizzying variety of commodities (though not, apparently, slaves, as some have thought). ..."

NY Times: Rimbaud’s Wise Music By Lydia Davis
John Ashbery’s Arthur Rimbaud
rain taxi - The Illuminated Text: John Ashbery translates Rimbaud
Guardian: Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud – review
amazon: Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud, John Ashbery