Pour une biographie imaginaire d’Arthur Rimbaud

Abstract

Arthur Rimbaud’s animated and enigmatic life has never stopped intriguing the later generations. The unsatiated curiosity about the details of his past as a poet and adventurer is at the origin of the creation of the texts that exploit some known, often stereotyped, biographical elements, or use as the basic argument such or another fragment of the biography to change its meaning or to immortalize a myth which is forming from one generation to another. The idea is to demonstrate that the attempts to reconstruct Rimbaud’s biography often go through the fascination of the mystery, the hidden, the original or the unspeakable to offer to the reader a second life of the poet, more attractive and richer in interpretations. The imaginary biography, be it partial or complete, allows the author to pass on the essential element of his biographical query, to update the myth of the poet and, finally, to speak about himself.