Tuesday, August 30, 2011

News at Eleven: It's tempting to see, in the wild

divergence between his [Arthur Rimbaud's] parents' natures, the origins of Rimbaud's eccentric seesawing between literature and commerce.

Certainly the teen-rebel phase that began when he was around fifteen looks like a reaction to life with Vitalie. The frenetic pursuit of what, in one letter, he called "free freedom" runs like a leitmotif through Rimbaud's life: few poets have walked, run, ridden, or sailed as frequently or as far as he did. Late in the summer of 1870, a couple of months before his sixteenth birthday, he ran away from Vitalie's dour home and took a train to Paris: the first of many escapes.

from New Yorker: Rebel Rebel

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