One Minute You're Here Trivia Quiz

Answer:

Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in northern France, where he grew up a brilliant youth. He was also considered very rebellious and restless, always yearning to be somewhere else. He clashed with family and authorities and started writing poetry at just sixteen years old as a way to escape daily life. His work astonished his teachers with its remarkable imagery and (very) unconventional flowing style. He soon headed out to go to Paris to join the literary world he had heard about. There he met the older poet Paul Verlaine, and the two formed a highly intense, but volatile, relationship. They often traveled together, especially to Belgium, and these times with Paul greatly influenced Rimbaud's work.

"A Season In Hell" is a raw, very emotional work where Rimbaud reflects on suffering, his rebellious nature, and what he saw as his troubled past. It was penned in the aftermath of his violent breakup with Verlaine, where he had been physically and emotionally scarred. He describes his feeling as agony and a type of "hell, eternal punishment". This raw honesty would go on to influence writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and to help drive some of the work of the Beat generation in the mid 1940s. In contrast, "Illuminations" is mysterious and dreamlike, made up of prose poems filled with strange images. For example, "I alone have the key to this savage parade".

"The Drunken Boat" was written when he was only 16. This 100-line poem is a masterpiece of symbolism. It describes the journey of a boat, which is a metaphor for Rimbaud himself, that has broken free from its handlers and is drifting through a chaotic, hallucinatory ocean. He says at one point, "I drifted, feeling myself no longer guided by the haulers". In "Vowels", he creates sensory connections, such as "A black, E white, I red". It is a prime example of synesthesia in art, where one sense is described in terms of another. "Sensation", however, is very simple and calm (especially compared to his other works). There are lines like "I will go through the summer evenings, along the paths", and expresses joy and freedom in relation to a walk through nature.

Rimbaud suddenly stopped writing poetry around 1875, in his twenty-first year. Many attribute this fact to his disillusionment with life (it was not what he envisioned as a child) and his tragic relationship with Paul. Others think he felt he had simply pushed the art as far as he wanted. After stopping, he began traveling extensively, especially around the continent of Africa. In Harar, Ethiopia, he dealt in goods such as coffee, ivory, and guns. He lived a hard life until sickness forced him to return to France, where he died in 1891. Arthur Rimbaud, however, had already revolutionized literature by breaking poetic rules and using raw emotion. This would inspire generations of various writers down the road.