The first translation of the poet’s complete works when it was published in 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters introduced a new generation of Americans to the alienated genius-among them the Doors’s lead singer Jim Morrison, who wrote to translator Wallace Fowlie to thank him for rendering the poems accessible to those who 'don’t read French that easily.' Forty years later, the book remains the only side-by-side bilingual edition of Rimbaud’s complete poetic works. More than a century after his death, the young rebel-poet continues to appeal to modern readers as much for his turbulent life as for his poetry his stormy affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and his nomadic adventures in eastern Africa are as iconic as his hallucinatory poems and symbolist prose. But Morrison reportedly once said, ”Let’s just say I was testing the boundaries of reality,” and Fowlie, now a Duke professor emeritus, is that rare academician who can truly help us savor what Jim Morrison meant.The enfant terrible of French letters, Jean-Nicholas-Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91) was a defiant and precocious youth who wrote some of the most remarkable prose and poetry of the nineteenth century, all before leaving the world of verse by the age of twenty-one. Rimbaud And Jim Morrison: The Rebel As Poet is good old-fashioned scholarly criticism that illuminates the poetry instead of ego-lighting the critic. Twenty-six years later, the result is this lucid exploration of common ground between French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud and rock poet Morrison: the myths surrounding each, the forces that drove their astonishingly brief careers, and their electrically terse word-pictures. Like all good teachers, Fowlie asked his students and began applying his expertise to what they taught him. ”Dear Wallace Fowlie…thanks for doing the Rimbaud translation…I am a rock singer and your book travels around with me.” The 1968 note was signed Jim Morrison, but French literature professor Fowlie had no idea who that was.

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