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Books Like Cahiers de Douai by Arthur Rimbaud
The debut notebooks of a fifteen-year-old genius — where French modernism begins
Two manuscript exercise books sent to his teacher Izambard in 1870, containing the earliest poems of a fifteen-year-old Rimbaud: 'Sensation,' 'Ma Bohème,' 'Le Dormeur du val,' and others — the astonishing beginning of one of the briefest and most influential literary careers in history.
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Buy on AmazonPoésies
by Arthur Rimbaud
The complete verse poems (1870-72) that follow from the Douai Notebooks — collecting the Douai poems alongside the later 1871 verse and 'Le Bateau ivre' shows the full arc of development from these first notebooks to the visionary breakthrough.
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Buy on AmazonIlluminations
by Arthur Rimbaud
The destination of the development that begins in the Douai Notebooks — comparing the accessible opening of 'Sensation' with the full hallucinatory prose poetry of the Illuminations shows the extraordinary two-year trajectory.
- 3Buy on Amazon
Une saison en enfer
by Arthur Rimbaud
The farewell work that explicitly reflects on the whole visionary career — reading the Cahiers de Douai first makes the Season in Hell's self-criticism and departure legible as the close of a specific trajectory that began here.
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Buy on AmazonLes Fleurs du mal
by Charles Baudelaire
The collection Rimbaud was reading when he wrote the Douai Notebooks — the young poet was simultaneously imitating and trying to transcend Baudelaire; the early verse is in direct dialogue with Les Fleurs du mal.
- 5Buy on Amazon
Poèmes saturniens
by Paul Verlaine
Verlaine's debut collection (1866) — exactly contemporary with the early Rimbaud verse, and the work of the poet who would later invite Rimbaud to Paris and change both their lives; comparing the two debuts shows two different responses to the same Parnassian starting point.
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Buy on AmazonRimbaud: A Biography
by Graham Robb
The best modern Rimbaud biography (Picador, 2000) gives the essential context for the Charleville years, the three runaways, and the creation of the Douai Notebooks — understanding the circumstances of the adolescent runaway poet transforms the reading of the poems.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Saison en enfer, Illuminations
by Arthur Rimbaud (bilingual)
A bilingual edition bringing together the two great prose works — helpful to read alongside the early verse of the Douai Notebooks to see the full before-and-after of Rimbaud's development.
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Buy on AmazonLes Voix intérieures
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's lyric collection (1837) is one of the Romantic models the fifteen-year-old Rimbaud was imitating in the Douai Notebooks before he superseded them — understanding the tradition makes the originality of even these earliest poems visible.
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