Rating: 
Summary: Examining the Rimbaud myth.
Review: An enjoyable book-- it's well-written and apparently well-researched, if occasionally a little snarky in tone. Robb has a rare talent (Mitford-esque, if I dare say so) for injecting his point of view in a way that is visible but not overly intrusive. I was glad to have him as a narrative presence throughout the book. I haven't thought about Rimbaud in years. I read _A Season in Hell_ as a high school student, as you do, but wasn't converted. I never really made a serious effort to engage his poetry or his life. I was motivated to pick this book up after reading a review, and I can say that I'm glad I did. What interested me in reading the biography is how much Rimbaud myth I'd unintentionally absorbed over the years. As I was reading I naturally picked out the little bits I thought I knew and nearly all of them fell under the category of the creative myth-making around him that Robb discusses in the book. He spends a lot of time on the subject of the Rimbaud myth and unwraps the layers for the reader, and the truth was actually a lot more interesting than the fiction in the end. The book inspired me to go back to A Season in Hell and maybe pick up the collected letters. Rimbaud becomes a great deal more interesting if you look at his entire career and not just the period before he turned 19. Generally: A good read & worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: Examining the Rimbaud myth.
Review: An enjoyable book-- well-written and apparently well-researched, if occasionally a little snarky in tone.
Robb has a rare talent (Mitford-esque, if I dare say so) for injecting his point of view in a way that is visible but not overly intrusive. I was glad to have him as a narrative presence throughout the book.
I haven't thought about Rimbaud in years. I read _A Season in Hell_ as a high school student, as you do, but wasn't converted. I never really made a serious effort to engage his poetry or his life. I was motivated to pick this book up after reading a review, and was not disappointed. If you would like to read beyond the tortured artist and into the life of a fascinating and important literary figure, then this is the book for you.
What interested me in reading the biography is how much Rimbaud myth I had unintentionally absorbed over the years. Robb tells the reader a lot about the Rimbaud myth, and I think that many readers are going to find that much of what they thought they knew was not true. He spends a lot of time on the and unwraps the layers for the reader. In that sense, the book also becomes a look at how narrative fictions develop about literary figures. In any case, the facts about Rimbaud are happily much more interesting than the fiction.
The book has inspired me to go back to A Season in Hell and maybe pick up the collected letters. Rimbaud becomes a great deal more interesting if you look at his entire career and not just the period before he turned 19.
Generally: A good read & worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: Who knew that PAUL VERLAINE was so interesting?!
Review: I won't bother reviewing the book extensively, because the other reviews and the Amazon summary does a great job, but I would like to add a few thoughts.
When I was a child I heard about A Season In Hell. I first heard about in Rimbaud in an utterly forgettable movie, but now I must remember it because it introduced me to the greatest Poet who ever lived. I read the poem and I didn't understand much of it, but what I did understand is that it was hauntingly beautiful, and wonderfully depraved. Almost twenty years later I still don't understand all of the poem, and my opinion has not changed. Still I didn't know much about the man except that he faked his own death. I read bits of information, part of a biography that was poorly written, and I sadly gave up on this story for years. When a friend recommended this book, not for Rimbaud, he accidentally got it in a book of the month club and decided to read it, but because it was a great book. To which I wholeheartedly agree. It is more than just a book about a genius and a poet, but it is a wonderfully written book filled with dry humor and insightful commentary.
Best of all for the lovers of literature and fact, this book dispels many, many myths about Arthur Rimbaud while still keeping true to the demonic young man and his disreputable behavior and youth fueled fury. I will say that sometimes the book felt more like a love letter, and the author did hold back a bit, but only rarely and only in words not in thought...
Read this book because it is a great book about a great man. *WARNING* This book will make you think, and may even make your life seem small in comparison! It is a great motivator for all of us with wandering spirits, fanciful dreams, but sedentary lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not a must read
Review: Rimbaud was an interesting character. If you are not into the Rimbaud poetry, mystique, history, etc. then this book can get a little long. This is not a life you absolutely need to know about. While the book is pretty well written, I wouldn't buy or read it again. If you are a big Rimbaud fan I'm sure you will love this book.
Rating:
Summary: Finally, a biography that Rimbaud deserves
Review: Rimbaud's life has been subjected to more myth-making and sentimental drivel than any other 19th century poet, probably because his life is such a great story. Teenage visionary turns thirtysomething gun-runner - what a headline! The great virtue of Graham Robb's biography is that he pays such close attention to the details of Rimbaud's life as it was actually lived, and doesn't allow the work, or indeed the correspondence, to dictate to him the meaning of it all. The last great English-language Rimbaud biography was Enid Starkie's, now over forty years old, and while Starkie did massive valuable research (she later claimed, in classic biographer-rebel style, that she paid for her research by granting sexual favours to wealthy Frenchmen), her tone and approach were flawed by the temptation to rewrite Rimbaud's entire life in terms of his glittering adolescence, which was after all the time when he produced his poetry. Graham Robb combines an alert and vivid appreciation of Rimbaud's genius with a scepticism about Rimbaud's published statements about himself. This is a portrait of the artist as lifelong liar and shyster, and while Robb's Rimbaud is one of the least attractive heroes ever depicted, it seems all too true in the light of Rimbaud's withering, laser-like intelligence. While Robb is exceptionally good at showing us the young, anti-social, utterly selfish teenage genius, you can tell from his crisp prose style and sardonic wit that while he admires the poetry, he finds the boy hard to like. This seems eminently fair in view of Rimbaud's youthful lack of any sense of gratitude, morality or decent behaviour. The older Rimbaud was more inclined to honour his obligations, but Robb convincingly demonstrates how the African Rimbaud's repeated complaints of having no money don't square up to his actual dealings with banks. It seems that Rimbaud the arms dealer was not the bungling innocent of legend, but a shrewd operator who made a considerable amount of money. Robb's Rimbaud is a more modern figure, even a more (gulp) postmodern figure than we're used to in Rimbaud studies. This is no romantic dreamer (despite a dubious epilogue, the only false note in the book, I thought); Rimbaud seems to have dreamed the worst excesses of the 20th century before they happened, and reinvented himself as a man who could feel at home in them. It's a bracing, witty, scrupulous and searching biography of an exemplary figure - the brilliant boy who helped to create our idea of modern literature, and the brutally cynical man who regarded his early achievements as a drastically stupid dead end. The Rimbaud story will always be a fascinating and chilling cautionary tale; exactly what we're being cautioned against is only beginning to become apparent.
Rating:
Summary: nasty and bourgeois genius.
Review: Rimbaud: A Biography
Graham Robb's Rimbaud biography. Fantastic read, not enough about the poetry, perhaps, but sufficient about the life in Africa to demolish the myth of Rimbaud as anti-establishment.
Amazing how thoroughly nasty and bourgeois AR was. He stayed in Africa because he was trying to save up for a good wife. He said if he returned poor he would only get a widow. He hoped to get a college girl if he returned rich enough. While in Africa he was beaten almost to death after cutting an infibulated girl with a knife and seriously wounding her. He was not killed because Muslims dont kill madmen.
He trafficked in guns and traveled with slave caravans. He is recorded as attempting to buy two boy slaves.
The most astounding thing about AR is his, and his families, treatment of his older brother. Alfred "married a pregnant pauper" and for this terrible crime against bourgeois values he was cut off from the family as if he didnt exist. Alfred became a bus driver, had three children, but Arthur determined he would get none of his money, and the family never contacted him.
That said, I would definitely read the poems, or watch Terence Stamp or DiCaprio in the movies
Rating: 
Summary: The diary of a mad man
Review: Sometimes the line is blurred between being a genius and being a mad man. Rimbaud is such a case. While I am not convinced by Robb's thesis that Rimbaud is a poet-genius who has been grossly overlooked, one cannot help but being at awe to read about his extremely outrageous behaviour and his unconventional life style. His relationship with Verlain is one of the highlight of this book. But his later life in search of his identity in various exotic locale, is much more interesting. Robb has done a great job in telling this unusual life. But somehow his story telling is not as fluid as his "Victor Hugo" book which I admire very much. Compared to his work on Victor Hugo, one can't help but feel that this Rimbaud's book has been put too hastily.
Rating:
Summary: The Tale of a Mad Angel
Review: The best book to read on Rimbaud. Robb dispells myths, only to replace them with the even more awe-inspiring reality. His writing is perfect for this biography; it has a narrative tone, with occasional quips and asides, but most importantly it never gets in the way of understanding the fascinating life of the man behind the poetry.
Rating:
Summary: "I am in Hell, therefore I am."
Review: The road to Hell has been well-travelled by many poets, including Rimbaud (1854-91), who wrote about his season there in Une Saison en Enfer (1873). Abandoned by his father when he was six (pp. 12, 156), and "marooned in a seedy neighorhood" in Charleville (p. 12), Rimbaud's biography tells the story of a tortured soul imprisoned in the ever-changing persona of a "grim-faced urchin" (p. 128), "rebel," "pagan" (p. 81), poet, "seer," "genius" (p. 126), "marriage-wrecker" (p. 156), "shabby young man" (p. 237), factory worker (p. 244), tutor (p. 262), beggar, docker (p. 269), mercenary (pp. 277-78), sailor (p. 285), explorer (p. 289), "angel in exile" (p. 289), trader (p. 315), gun runner (p. 341, Chapters 33-34), and money changer (p. 409). Rimbaud wonders, "O seasons, O castles, What soul is without fault?" (p. 158). "I came to find my mind's disorder sacred," Rimbaud tells us (p. 154). In this 445-page "reconstruction of Rimbaud's life" (p. xviii), Graham Robb insightfully reveals how his subject's life--and stormy relationship with Paul Verlaine--provided Rimbaud "with some splendid material for his poetry" (p. 211) before he took an "agile leap into silence" (p. 240), and abandoned poetry when he was 21. For Rimbaud, the "idea was 'to see everything up close, to describe modern life with fearless precision, the way in which it warps the human being'" (p. 55). In Robb's superb biography, it is never easy to connect with Rimbaud, the person, but as a rebel poet he is mesmerizing, even as a silent poet "disappearing over the horizon of the page" (p. 281). Although the journey may be difficult for many of Rimbaud's admirers, Robb follows Rimbaud "into the badlands of his post-poetic career" (p. 289), and to the poet's funeral no one attended in Charleville (p. 441). You will probably not find the Rimbaud you expect in Parts Three and Four of this book. It was only posthumously that Rimbaud became a Symbolist, Surrealist, Beat, revolutionary, avant-gardes poet (p. xiv). "For now, I am damned," Rimbaud writes near the end of his raison d'etre as a poet. "I detest the fatherland. The best thing would be a good drunken sleep on the beach" (p. 231). "Rimbaud gave up writing poetry," Robb notes, "but few people, having acquired the taste, ever give up reading it" (p. xviii). And with fascinating biographies such as this, it is unlikely readers will ever lose interest in Rimbaud. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: The Rimbaud nobody knew
Review: This amazing biography by Graham Robb (following his other amazing biographies of Balzac and Hugo) is one of the best books I have ever read on any subject. Rimbaud a hero? Think again! The details are all in here, and they show us a Rimbaud who was an advanced sociopath, stabbing people, pouring sulfuric acid into their drinks,...constantly drunk and on drugs, always avoiding work and treating other people hatefully. Whew! Yet somehow, in some way, he retains at least some of our sympathy. His contemporaries report that he "stank of genius," and they tolerated all of his enormous faults simply because they wanted to be around him. If you have seen "Total Eclipse," this book will give you all the information which you couldn't find in the movie. It's fascinating, and it's really good at handling the poetry as well. Highest recommendation!
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