Arthur Rimbaud

French · 1854 to 1891

Born Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud on October 20, 1854, in the provincial garrison town of Charleville in the Ardennes, the second son of an infantry captain who deserted the family for permanent military postings and a devout, joyless mother whose private nickname he made into French literature, Mouth of Darkness, he was the prodigy of his lycée, writing Latin verse to commission and Greek hexameters in his sleep. At fifteen he ran away to Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and was briefly imprisoned for travelling without a ticket. At sixteen he wrote The Drunken Boat. In September 1871 he arrived at the Paris house of the established poet Paul Verlaine, who was twenty-seven and recently married; within weeks the two were lovers and on the move through Brussels and London, drinking absinthe and smoking hashish, writing the work that would change French poetry. The affair ended in Brussels on July 10, 1873, when Verlaine, drunk and abandoned, shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was given two years' hard labour. Rimbaud finished A Season in Hell that autumn at the family farm at Roche, paid for a tiny first edition, and stopped writing literature at twenty. He went to Java, to Cyprus, to Aden, and finally to Harar in Abyssinia, where he traded coffee and guns and learned Amharic. The manuscript of Illuminations, smuggled out of his luggage by Verlaine, was published in 1886 without his knowledge. He died on November 10, 1891, in Marseille, at the age of thirty-seven, of bone cancer in his amputated right leg, in the hospital of the Conception, his sister Isabelle at his bedside.