French · 1854–1891
Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet born in Charleville in 1854. He wrote almost all of his work between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. Early poems such as The Drunken Boat and Vowels made him a leading figure of Symbolism, and his letters on the poet as a seer set out a radical idea of poetic vision. From 1871 he had a turbulent relationship with the poet Paul Verlaine, which ended in 1873 when Verlaine shot him in the wrist in Brussels. That year Rimbaud published A Season in Hell, the only book he saw through print himself. Illuminations, a collection of prose poems, appeared in 1886 without his involvement. By about 1875 he had stopped writing poetry. He travelled through Europe, Java and Cyprus, then worked as a trader in Yemen and Ethiopia, dealing in coffee and arms. He developed a tumour in his knee, returned to France, and died in Marseille in 1891 at thirty-seven. His break with traditional form influenced the Surrealists and many later poets.