Title: Rimbaud Author: Graham Robb Publisher: Picador Few myths have been as powerfully seductive as those that surround Arthur Rimbaud, the French symbolist poet who set the Parisian literary scene alight during the 1870s, was shot by his lover, pissed off to Africa and gave up poetry, all before he turned 20. Cited by Dylan, Patti Smith, the Beat writers, Marc Almond, Jim Morrison and scores of others who have sought to achieve enlightenment via excess, the author of, most famously, A Season in Hell and the Illuminations is, like Proust, often more name-dropped than read, more referred to in pretentious passing than enjoyed. Thankfully Graham Robb, well known for his biography of Balzac, has set out to dig beneath the myth of Rimbaud’s mayhem and he succeeds in a manner that sent be not only back to my poetry books but also to my atlas. What Robb succeeds most at is giving Rimbaud back his life, after his much-discussed yet little-researched disappearance to Africa. The modernist/romantic version whispers of gun trade and native boys, whispers, Robb notes, that serve only to further support the theories of those who claim him as theirs - literary scholars, after all, can hardly beatify a man who has decided that business, not art, is the value of one’s life. Rimbaud’s legend depends on speculation, rather than the evidence Robb meticulously presents on the activities of Msr Rimbaud the explorer, the merchant, the heterosexual, middle-aged businessman. In the end Robb’s biography works by stripping away the layers, his exploration and careful detailing helping to separate Arthur Rimbaud and the mythological author of “The Arsehole Sonnet.” Often biographies function as sycophantic objects of adoration, or bitter tales of gossip and malice; instead Rimbaud is a well-crafted analysis of the lives and work of one of France’s greatest writers. If you haven't read any of Rimbaud’s poetry before then I suggest you make that pilgrimage before you open the biography; your voyage will be well worth it when, after reading Robb’s work, you return anew to read the works of a man who once claimed morality was a disease of the brain.