This is a biographical journey through three continents and many different identities: the Bohemian poet in Victorian London, the mercenary in Java, the gun-runner and explorer in East Africa. By allowing the boy poet to grow up, Robb casts Arthur Rimbaud's later years in an entirely new light.An astute and engrossing biography from the author of Victor Hugo and Balzac Granam Robb's brilliant biography moves Rimbaud on from his perpetual adolescence where our imaginations have held him to show the extent of his transformations. From phenomenally precocious schoolboy he became Europe's most shocking and exhilarating poet, author of poems that range from the exquisite to the obscene. But this brief, five-year period as the enfant-terible of French literature is only one small side of Rimbaud's story. Robb takes us on a biographical journey through three continents and many different identities. Rimbaud emerges from this stunning work of biographical scholarship and historical imagination as an even more complex, ambiguous and fascinating figure than ever before.
