French poet who wrote his entire body of work between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, abandoned literature forever at the age he might otherwise have been finishing university, and, in those six years, remade what a poem could do so thoroughly that modernism, surrealism, the Beats, and most of what has happened in serious Western poetry since are in some sense commentary on him. Born in Charleville, in the French Ardennes, to a brutal mother and an absent soldier father, Rimbaud was a prodigy in the Latin school sense before he was a prodigy in any other — a prize-winning schoolboy who at fifteen could write Latin verse of professional quality — and ran away to Paris, repeatedly, through the Commune year of 1871.
In September 1871 he sent Paul Verlaine a handful of poems, including "Le Bateau ivre" (The Drunken Boat). Verlaine sent money and an invitation. What followed — the two-year affair, the wanderings through Belgium and London, the drunken scenes, Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in the wrist in Brussels in July 1873 and serving two years in prison — is the most famous scandal in 19th-century French literature and has tended to overshadow the work. Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), the small book Rimbaud printed himself and abandoned, is the one work he published as a book in his lifetime. Illuminations — the forty-odd prose poems and free-verse pieces written probably between 1872 and 1875 — was published by Verlaine in 1886, by which time Rimbaud had long since vanished into Africa and the Arabian peninsula as an arms trader and colonial agent.
The famous program of the May 1871 "lettres du voyant" — the "seer letters" to his teacher Izambard and to Paul Demeny, setting out at sixteen the project of dérèglement de tous les sens (the systematic derangement of all the senses) and the poet as voyant (seer) — remains the most-quoted single document in French poetics. "Je est un autre" — I is another. He came home to Charleville in 1875, burned the manuscripts he could find, and spent the last sixteen years of his life at first in a succession of European jobs and then, from 1880, as a trader in Aden and Harar (Ethiopia), writing only letters. He died in Marseille at thirty-seven, of bone cancer, not having seen his own book in print.