Poesies Completes

Publisher Marketing: Si l'on devait citer le poete qui a exerce l'influence la plus profonde sur la poesie du debut du XXe siecle, il faudrait nommer Rimbaud. Avec plus de hardiesse encore que Baudelaire, il a etendu le champ d'exploration de la poesie. Avant lui, l'experience poetique etait principalement l'experience de la creation litteraire. Apres lui, la poesie devient un moyen de connaissance. C'est qu'il n'a pas hesite a se mettre en communication avec la part inconnaissable de lui-meme. Il y a decouvert un grand jeu d'images, fleurs eclatees, filles a levres d'orange, deluges et miracles, un jeu dont chaque figure ressemble a un message marque d'un sceau incomprehensible et sacre. Des lors, Rimbaud va liberer tous les phenomenes de l'inconscient, preparer les voies du surrealisme et creer, si l'on veut, un nouveau mystere dont les symboles resteront etrangers au merveilleux et au fantastique. Contributor Bio:  Rimbaud, Arthur Unknown beyond the avant-garde at the time of his death in 1891, Arthur Rimbaud has become one of the most liberating influences on twentieth-century culture. Born Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud in Charleville, France, in 1854, Rimbaud's family moved to Cours d'Orleans, when he was eight, where he began studying both Latin and Greek at the Pension Rossat. While he disliked school, Rimbaud excelled in his studies and, encouraged by a private tutor, tried his hand at poetry. Shortly thereafter, Rimbaud sent his work to the renowned symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and received in response a one-way ticket to Paris. By late September 1871, at the age of sixteen, Rimbaud had ignited with Verlaine one of the most notoriously turbulent affairs in the history of literature. Their relationship reached a boiling point in the summer of 1873, when Verlaine, frustrated by an increasingly distant Rimbaud, attacked his lover with a revolver in a drunken rage. The act sent Verlaine to prison and Rimbaud back to Charleville to finish his work on "A Season in Hell". The following year, Rimbaud traveled to London with the poet Germain Nouveau, to compile and publish his transcendent "Illuminations". It was to be Rimbaud's final publication. By 1880, he would give up writing altogether for a more stable life as merchant in Yemen, where he stayed until a painful condition in his knee forced him back to France for treatment. In 1891, Rimbaud was misdiagnosed with a case of tuberculosis synovitis and advised to have his leg removed. Only after the amputation did doctors determine Rimbaud was, in fact, suffering from cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseille in November of 1891, at the age of 37. He is now considered a saint to symbolists and surrealists, and his body of works, which include "Le bateau ivre" (1871), "Une Saison en Enfer" (1873), and "Les Illuminations" (1873), have been widely recognized as a major influence on artists stretching from Pablo Picasso to Bob Dylan. Contributor Bio:  Jonson, Will John Davidson was born in Barrhead in Renfrewshire in 1857. He spent his childhood years in Greenock, and after working as a pupil-teacher and briefly attending Edinburgh University, taught in schools in Glasgow and Perth. In 1989 he moved to London where he made his living as a journalist and critic. Several dramas had been published while he was still in Scotland, but in the 1890s he turned to poetry, and published several collections which were very popular: In a Music-Hall (1891) and Ballads and Songs (1894) amongst them. These were poems which chronicled urban working class life, and his sense of outrage at the poverty of the ordinary man, as expressed by the much-anthologized 'Thirty Bob a Week'. At the beginning of the new century he moved away from the lyric and began writing in blank verse which incorporated much scientific language; this series of Testaments were not as successful as his earlier ballad style, though Hugh MacDiarmid was to pay tribute to Davidson's attempts to combine poetry with scientific ideas. Despite the early popularity of the poetry, financial difficulties constantly plagued Davidson; he had had no choice but to continue with the journalism he disliked in order to support his family and other dependents. Sadly the money worries, combined with ill-health and depression, drove him to committing suicide in 1909.