This slender biography means to unravel the legend that surrounds the  poet Arthur Rimbaud. He is at once the arrogant child-demon and the angelically talented visionary, testing the boundaries of literary and social convention. White begins autobiographically by chronicling his own sycophantic interest in the rebel poet who expertly voiced the concerns of a young gay man, troubled by ennui and dedicated to writing. Rimbaud has been famously iconic to numerous artistic campaigns. He was declared the standard bearer to the Surrealists and the Beats, and has been eulogized or analyzed by generations of writers and musicians. White reflects on the persistence of Rimbaud’s legend in contrast to that of his lover, Verlaine, despite the unequal length of their careers. Not surprisingly, he notes, “obscure poets (and Rimbaud invented obscurity) become more renowned than transparent ones since only the obscure need interpretation.” This biography does not so much unravel Rimbaud’s obscurity as simply chronicle it.

From petulantly ambitious youth to African entrepreneur, Rimbaud’s story is all across the map. The small-town boy, enchanted by the allure of the metropolis, leapt into hedonistic bohemia and became prophet and pariah to his fellow artists. Rimbaud audaciously called for a new era of poetry, insistent on the role of the poet as visionary seer. Even known as a notorious miscreant, the young poet’s talent was noticed, though not seriously until much later in his life when he was already following his own prescription to discard all the work of the past. During the last decade of his life he spoke critically of his former life and was uninterested in literature or the praise that his poetic talent garnered. He was only in his early thirties, had already traveled extensively, and was living in Harrar as a trader. It was the life he had dreamed of as a teenager, complaining of boredom and writing about exotic adventures. Now, acquainted with the exoticism he had longed for, he was again dissatisfied. White points out that this disillusion could have been anticipated by inspecting Rimbaud’s famous poem, The Drunken Boat. The poem is an odyssey through exotic locals, but the narrator is not the agent of direction, he is an unmoored boat, carried by circumstance. By the poem’s end we do not greet an enlightened traveler, instead we see a small boy floating a toy boat on a puddle.

White’s biography is not a detailed deconstruction of Rimbaud’s work. Poems only show up as illustrations of incidents or as insight into the poet’s perspective of his own life. In fact, Verlaine’s work shows up as often as Rimbaud’s in this book. As his autobiographical introduction suggests, White’s concentration is on the troubled love story of Verlaine and Rimbaud. It is this relationship that brought Rimbaud into the public eye, helped ostracize him from society and ended up making his literary reputation. We see more about the unraveling of these two men than the unraveling of the Rimbaud legend, which was White’s intention. This brief treatment of Rimbaud’s brief life is a good jumping off point for the burgeoning Rimbaud reader.

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