"The poet makes himself into a visionary by a long derangement of
all the senses."--Rimbaud
In 1968 Jim Morrison, founder and lead singer of the rock band
the Doors, wrote to Wallace Fowlie, a scholar of French literature
and a professor at Duke University. Morrison thanked Fowlie for
producing an English translation of the complete poems of Rimbaud.
He needed the translation, he said, because, "I don't read French
that easily. . . . I am a rock singer and your book travels around
with me." Fourteen years later, when Fowlie first heard the music
of the Doors, he recognized the influence of Rimbaud in Morrison's
lyrics.
In "Rimbaud and Jim Morrison" Fowlie, a master of the form of the
memoir, reconstructs the lives of the two youthful poets from a
personal perspective. In their twinned stories he discovers an
uncanny symmetry, a pattern far richer than the simple truth that
both led lives full of adventure and both made poetry of their
thirst for the liberation of the self. The result is an engaging
account of the connections between an exceptional French symbolist
who gave up writing poetry at the age of twenty, died young, and
whose poems are still avidly read to this day, and an American rock
musician whose brief career ignited an entire generation and has
continued to fascinate millions around the world in the twenty
years since his death in Paris. In this dual portrait, Fowlie gives
us a glimpse of the affinities and resemblances between European
literary traditions and American rock music and youth culture in
the late twentieth century.
A personal meditation on two unusual, yet emblematic, cultural
figures, this book also stands as a summary of a noted scholar's
lifelong reflections on creative artists.
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