“Mr. Duffy’s strategy is to flesh out the intense relationship biographers have established between Rimbaud and his rigid Roman Catholic mother, to elevate it to equal status with the connection to Verlaine, which dominates Ms. Holland’s film.
That approach allows Mr. Duffy to supply answers to the question, ‘How, in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life — unwrite it?’ Mr. Duffy suggests, for one thing, that Rimbaud wanted to impress his mother, who didn’t care for all that literary rot.”
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