... Conventional wisdom holds that poets have little impact on popular culture. But renowned gay writer Edmund White’s engaging new biography of 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud stands this myth on its head. White tells the story of Rimbaud who, though he wrote poetry only as a teenager, has influenced creative artists from Marcel Proust to the Surrealists to Bob Dylan to Patti Smith. In fewer than 200 pages, White makes the elements of Rimbaud’s life come alive, especially his battles with his overbearing mother, the moment when his lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, shot him in the wrist, his travels and, most important, his poetry. Rimbaud, who lived from 1854 to 1891, was born in Charleville, a small town in France. When he was 6, his father, an army captain, left the family. The family then moved to a lower-class neighborhood. His mother, a strict Catholic, determined that Rimbaud would be pious and well-behaved, became enraged when she found him reading Victor Hugo, and forbid “her children to play with the ragamuffin...