Arthur Rimbaud

Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854–November 10, 1891) was a French poet.

Arthur Rimbaud was born into the rural middle class of Charleville in the Ardennes Forest region of the Marne departement in northern France. As a boy Rimbaud was a restless but gifted student. By the age of fifteen, he had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in Latin.

In 1870 his teacher Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's first literary mentor, and his original verses in French began to improve rapidly. He ran away from home to briefly join the Paris Commune of 1870, and returned to Paris in 1871 at the invitation of eminent poet Paul Verlaine, moving briefly into Verlaine's home and then becoming immersed in Parisian street-life as a garrett dweller. Throughout this period he continued to write strikingly modern verses, following the example of Charles Baudelaire.

Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy romantic relationship swept them to London in 1872, when Verlaine left his wife and infant son. In 1873, having become an opium addict, Rimbaud left Verlaine, returned home to Charleville and completed his Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern Symbolist writing. In 1874 he returned to London with the poet Germaine Nouveau and assembled his controversial Illuminations, which includes the first two French poems in free verse. After a particularly violent quarrel in Brussels in 1876, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was consequently sent to jail for 18 months.

By then Rimbaud had given up writing, travelling extensively in Europe before becoming a merchant in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia). He made a small fortune as a gun-runner and may have dabbled in the slave trade. Rimbaud contracted gangrene and returned home in 1891, lost a leg and died in Marseilles on November 10. His poetry is unlikely to be appreciated without knowledge of both his biography and reputation, but his influence in modern literature, music and art has been pervasive.

His life in Paris was dramatised in a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio called Total Eclipse (1995).