I’ve preached before about the importance of reading outside your comfort zone. While usually that advice was directed at new writers, it’s a good idea for all of us not to turn too quickly away from the less familiar shelves in the bookstore.

One of my own literary blind spots is poetry. While I appreciate and enjoy “poetic prose” (and there’s a vague term for you), and have a great fondness for a well-turned phrase, straight verse has always been something of a mystery to me. I don’t read it, write it, or edit it. So, while it’s not technically poetry itself, Edmund White‘s Rimbaud: Double Life of a Rebel, published earlier this year by Atlantic Books, looked like a good opportunity for me to place at least a toe outside of my own prosaic comfort zone, and start to read around the genre a little.

Cover of Rimbaud by Edmund WhiteRimbaud is a brief biography, around two hundred pages. In fact, it was originally published in the US as part of the Atlas & Co series of author biographies—think the Hesperus Brief Lives, but written by established writers in their own right, told from a slightly more personal angle. Here, for example, Edmund White draws parallels between Rimbaud’s early rebelious nature and sexuality, and his own, tracing the impact of the French poet on his own personal development. This might leave the book open to accusations of subjectivity, but it’s actually what gives it value: we already have biographies of Rimbaud, which are quoted and recommended in White’s text. Here, at the same time as reading the key facts of Rimbaud’s life, we also witness the impact he had on Edmund White a century later.

Rimbaud himself seems to have been a thoroughly unpleasant type, abusive to everybody around him to a pathological degree—he was cruel in his relationship with Verlaine, and frequently attacked those who tried to help him (he was thrown out of one house after using a magazine that had just printed his host’s work as toilet paper). It might have been good to have more investigation of the reasons behind Rimbaud’s more extreme personality traits, but Edmund White is a writer rather than a psychologist, and the role of this book is therefore to examine the relationship between the writer and his work, which he does very well.

I’d be curious to see some more titles from this series, which seems to be a split-off from the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series, so let’s hope that Atlantic bring more titles over to the UK. In the meantime, Edmund White’s Rimbaud provides a good solid background to the poet’s work, which is just what I need if I’m to delve further… or maybe I’ll stick to the poet biographies, and leave the stuff itself to the poets.