Poet's Corner

Edmund White—celebrated critic, novelist, and biographer of Jean Genet and Marcel Proust—now turns his considerable talents toward Arthur Rimbaud (Atlas), the literary enfant terrible who, at a mere 17, became the baby-daddy of modern poetry, and at 21 abandoned it forever. The hallucinatory prose style of the visionary brat's Symbolist masterworks, A Season in Hell and Illuminations, and his declaration that the true poet must denounce bourgeois convention, are responsible for inspiring legions of tortured teen rebels, gay and straight (in White's case, gay), to pick up a pen. White confesses to also desiring a well-connected sugar daddy despite the fact that Rimbaud's scandalous affaire de coeur with married poet Paul Verlaine would destroy his career. In disgrace he'd die at 37, running guns in Africa. White's abiding kinship with Rimbaud gives this restless soul's well-traveled tale new fire.

E.S.