Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891) was a French poet whose entire literary output was produced between roughly the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. [1] His work, including Une saison en enfer and Illuminations, broke decisively with poetic convention and became a foundation for Symbolism, Surrealism and modernist verse. He renounced writing altogether in his early twenties and spent his remaining years as a traveller and trader in Africa. [2]
Early life
Rimbaud was born on 20 October 1854 in Charleville, in the Ardennes near the Belgian border, the second son of an army captain who abandoned the family and a strict, devout mother. [1] He was a prodigy at school, winning prizes for Latin verse and taking a first prize in the national Concours général, and he was writing accomplished French poetry by fifteen.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871 disrupted his schooling and fed his hostility to provincial society, religion and authority. He ran away to Paris repeatedly and was briefly imprisoned and destitute. [2]
Poetic revolution
In 1871, still sixteen, Rimbaud set out his programme in letters now known as the lettres du voyant, arguing that the poet must make himself a seer through a deliberate and sustained derangement of all the senses. [3] The poems of that year, including Le Bateau ivre, abandoned descriptive coherence for a torrent of image and sound.
He sent his verse to Paul Verlaine, who invited him to Paris. The two began an intense and destructive relationship, travelling together in Belgium and England, which ended in Brussels in July 1873 when Verlaine shot and wounded him and was imprisoned. [1] Rimbaud completed Une saison en enfer the same year, a short book of prose and verse fragments that is both a reckoning with that period and a farewell to his own ambitions. The prose poems of Illuminations, written around the same years, were published in 1886 through Verlaine's efforts, by which time Rimbaud had long ceased to care.
Abandonment of literature
By about 1875 Rimbaud had stopped writing. [2] He spent the following years in restless movement across Europe, working as a labourer and language tutor, enlisting briefly in the Dutch colonial army in Java and deserting, and travelling in Cyprus, Egypt and the Red Sea.
From 1880 he settled in Aden and then Harar, in what is now Ethiopia, working for a trading firm and later on his own account in coffee, hides and firearms. [1] He was among the first Europeans to travel in parts of the region, and sent geographical reports to the Société de Géographie in Paris. His letters home discuss commerce, climate and money, and show no interest in his growing literary reputation in France.
Death and legacy
In early 1891 a tumour in his right knee forced him to return to France, where the leg was amputated in Marseille. [1] His condition worsened and he died there on 10 November 1891, aged thirty-seven.
Rimbaud's influence has been out of all proportion to the brevity of his career. The Symbolists claimed him immediately, the Surrealists took his call for the derangement of the senses as a founding principle, and his prose poems helped establish free verse as a serious form. [4] His life, ending in silence and commerce far from literary Paris, has itself become one of the enduring myths of modern letters.
