Rimbaud and Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet

Rating:
Summary: an interesting novelty, but nothing special
Review: if wallace fowlie was going to write a book about the similarities between arthur rimbaud and jim morrison, couldn't he have at the very least learned just a few things about morrison and wrote some new thoughts or little known facts about rimbaud, rather than just cutting and pasting from his old study of the surrealist legend? anyone who is even mildly acquainted with his work on the adolescent rimbaud will have at first a strange but strong sensation of deja vu while reading this book, and if they have a decent memory, will realize that most of the passages in this book were lifted from his earlier work. some people will see this as acceptable because most of the info and commentary is poignant and accurate (if not very penetrating and a tad superficial), but i find it a little disrespectful to the reader. as if we're not going to notice it when he rewrites, word by word, his previous work. it does have it's merits, and it is fairly entertaining to read his accounts of college lectures given on the two poets of youthful rebellion and the ideological similarities between the 60's counterculture and the philosophy of the surrealists, but there simply isn't enough substantial, original stuff in the book to make it truly memorable. it is worth reading, but only just.

Rating:
Summary: Uncanny similarities
Review: Not only do Jim and Arthur have unbelivable talent, but thier lives are practicaly parallel. Startng from the lack of a father as children these men have lived similar lives. A well written book, "Rebel as Poet" displays this fact very well.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Memoir Padded With Derivative Commentary
Review: Wallace Fowlie, a French scholar, translator and commentator on many French poets, has written this short book on the connections between the lives and writings of Rimbaud and Morrison, two symbols of youthful, creative rebellion who lived more than a century apart. Unfortunately, while the short memoir of how Fowlie first came to connect these two figures is interesting and worthy of a short journalistic piece, the bulk of this book contains nothing more than truncated and regurgitated biographical sketches of Rimbaud and Morrison and disparate commentary on some of their writing.

Fowlie, who published an English translation of Rimbaud's collected poems in 1966, first heard of Morrison when he received a letter from him in 1968 thanking him for the English translation. Morrison implied that Rimbaud was an important writer for him: "I don't read French that easily . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me." Fowlie didn't know of Morrison until, many years later, he heard some of the music and lyrics of The Doors and recognized the influence of Rimbaud on the writing of Morrison. Fowlie's memoir relates how his discovery of these connections led to a series of lectures on Rimbaud and Morrison, lectures which were (not surprisingly!) received with enthusiasm and interest by his young college students at Duke and elsewhere.

Fowlie's discussion of Rimbaud's poetry, in addition to being cursory, can only be understood with a copy of his poems close at hand; without reading the poems in their entirety, Fowlie's commentary is largely unintelligible. With respect to Morrison, Fowlie does nothing more than regurgitate biographical details gleaned from other authors and discuss a few of Morrison's poems. Again, understanding the discussion of the poems suffers if you don't have the texts of Morrison's poems available.

While Fowlie's prose is wonderful and his brief anecdote of the way that Morrison and Rimbaud connected in Fowlie's own life interesting, the bulk of the book in unremarkable and derivative.